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"A couple of times when she was so focused on her work, she would park her car and leave it running overnight. She just forgot to turn it off."

Said Lawrence Lessig, about Elena Kagan, with whom he taught at the University of Chicago Law School.

What would this world be like if we were all utterly hard-working and focused? Fortunately, most of us are infinitely distractable and intermittently lazy.

As a scholar, Ms. Kagan?s interests were narrow, somewhat technical, and steered clear of ideology. She was interested in questions like when the government could limit free speech. ?This is not a subject about which there is any ideological slant,? [lawprof Geoff] Stone said. ?It?s an intellectual puzzle.?

She was granted tenure in 1995, despite the reservations of some colleagues who thought she had not published enough. 

Isn't it strange that she's said to be so ambitious and hardworking, yet she didn't produce scholarship? That worked out well for her, though. For Obama too!

[I]n 2003, Harvard?s president, Lawrence Summers (now Mr. Obama?s top economics adviser) named her dean. She took charge of what was, in effect, a dysfunctional family stuck in the legal Dark Ages.

The faculty was at odds with itself. The curriculum was out of date. The gym and the dining facilities were old and run-down. The professors were aging, the students unhappy and the law school was trailing Yale in the all-important school ranking in U.S. News & World Report.

Of course, Harvard is still behind Yale in U.S. News. (I wonder how many deans and lawprofs are agonizing over the NYT's calling the ranking "all-important." And "the legal Dark Ages" has got to be hurting a few law school egos.)

Ms. Kagan undertook a top-to-bottom transformation, making the faculty more diverse, at least ideologically...

"At least"... that's funny given the left's attack on Kagan for failing to hire women and members of racial minority groups.

Critics have noted that most of the hires were white men. Of the 43 new hires, four were minorities and nine were women.... 

As for getting agreement on the new hires, one Harvard law professor who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal politics at the school said that Ms. Kagan was more of a coalition-builder than a consensus-builder. The faculty was essentially divided into three blocs, this person said: conservative, liberal and one in the middle that usually went along with the dean.

Extrapolate that and apply it to the Supreme Court.

Full post as published by Althouse on May 10, 2010 (boomark / email).