In February 2005 the student branch of the Federalist Society (a group founded in the early ’80s to explore and promote conservative and libertarian perspectives on the law) held its national jamboree at Harvard Law School. At the banquet in a downtown hotel, Kagan rose to speak the host institutions’ words of greeting to the thousand or so federalists assembled from every corner of the country. She was greeted by a long and raucous ovation. With a broad grin and her unmistakable Upper West Side twang, the former Clinton White House official responded: “You are not my people.” This brought the dark-suited crowd of federalist students to their feet in a roar of affectionate approval. (It is worth a footnote that the next day the same group also cheered Larry Summers–God bless the federalists.)
Another episode: When my colleague Mary Ann Glendon–a favorite of the last pope and President Bush’s ambassador to the Vatican–awarded the inaugural Bradley Prize, a kind of MacArthur prize on the right, Kagan organized a celebratory dinner for her and invited not only her faculty friends, but the officers of the various student groups, including the Mormon group, she advises. Finally, when our alumnus Antonin Scalia, reached his twentieth anniversary on the Supreme Court, she arranged a gala celebratory dinner, at which she warmly introduced him to the assembly of faculty and students. (Harold Koh, dean at Yale, bestirred himself to do the same, but he could not bring himself to speak any warm words of introduction. He left that to a faculty member who had been Scalia’s clerk.)
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