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Fontana on Law School Culture & Kagan and Sotomayor

By Lawrence Solum

Check out The Postradical Legal Generation: Elite law schools, and the court nominees who come from them, have changed by David Fontana on The Chronicle of Higher Education online. Here is a taste:

The best evidence of [Kagan's] status as a member of the postradical generation is her time as dean of Harvard Law School. Kagan might have been the most important dean of the school in the past century, significantly changing the institution, but in neither a conservative nor liberal ideological direction. As Obama said when nominating her, "At a time when many believed that the Harvard faculty had gotten a little one-sided in its viewpoint, she sought to recruit prominent conservative scholars and spur a healthy debate on campus." The law school hired, for example, conservatives like John F. Manning and Adrian Vermeule. On the other hand, Kagan also backed the hiring of Mark Tushnet, a liberal law professor once associated with the critical-legal-studies movement, although now less with that movement and more with other forms of liberal legal scholarship.

A worthwhile read! But is Tushnet really a "liberal" now?

Full post as published by Legal Theory Blog on May 20, 2010 (boomark / email).