Kagan is often credited with overhauling the image of Harvard Law School, from a factory that churns out talented lawyers to a place that cultivates some of the best legal minds in the country.
For decades, Harvard was viewed as a fractured campus that didn’t care much about its students. Kagan started with small changes to improve student life: a volleyball court, an ice-skating rink and free coffee. “As it turns out, you can buy more student happiness per dollar by giving people free coffee than anything else I’ve discovered,” she said.
More importantly, Kagan also greatly improved Harvard’s faculty, increasing its size from 80 to more than 100 in just a few years. She made a handful of extremely high-profile hires, such as conservative jurists John Manning and Jack Goldsmith, who worked in the Office of Legal Counsel under George W. Bush and wrote a book, The Terror Presidency, about the legal issues the administration faced such as torture, Guantanamo Bay and wiretapping.
In February 2008, she hired Cass Sunstein, the longtime University of Chicago law professor who Kagan described as “the preeminent legal scholar of our time.”Bennett, Drake, “Crimson Tide,” Boston Globe, Oct. 19, 2008(7)Bennett, Drake, “Crimson Tide,” Boston Globe, Oct. 19, 2008 Sunstein now heads the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs in the Obama administration. wapodev01.ec2useast1a.jolokianet … lena_Kagan
Definately pro-gay:
As dean at Harvard, she cut off campus access for military recruiters because she felt the military’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy discriminates against homosexuals. She has referred to the policy as “a moral injustice of the first order.”
But when asked whether she could defend the policy, she demurs, alluding to the fact that she is now handling cases involving that very policy. npr.org/templates/story/stor … =121712227
