FIRST THIS:
Kagan Whitewash
May 5, 2010
By Evan Gahr
(Excerpts and snips from article)
United States Solicitor General Elena Kagan, who President Barack Obama interviewed April 30 to replace Justice John Paul Stevens on the Supreme Court, is widely considered a blank slate. But is she?
True, Kagan, a former Harvard Law School dean, would be the first person without judicial experience appointed to the Supreme Court since William Rehnquist in 1972, doesn’t have much of a paper trail.
Her views on most of the hot button issues she would likely decide on the Supreme Court–race relations, abortion and federalism, are mostly impossible to discern.
But Kagan does have an identifiable, though overlooked, track record on one matter and it’s a telling one. As Dean of Harvard Law School in 2004 and 2005 she treated two liberal law professors with kid gloves when they were busted for plagiarism. Her chicanery was so blatant that even a leftist academic said she should be fired for her “whitewash.”
Kagan’s essential absolution of both professors has been virtually unnoticed in the flood of stories about her possible Supreme Court nomination this year and in 2009 when she was considered a top candidate to replace liberal Justice David Souter.
But the way she handled professors Larry Tribe and Charles Ogletree, when they both were caught swiping the words of others, seems to violate basic principles of fairness.
She let the professors off easy for the kind of offense that for which any Harvard undergraduate or law school would have been suspended if not expelled.
As the Harvard Crimson wrote after Kagan and Harvard president Larry Summers declined to punish Tribe, “the glaring double standard set by Harvard stands as an inadequate precedent for future disappointments.”
It also could say a lot about Kagan would behave on the bench. Through inaction and disingenuous statements that disregarded Harvard’s own disciplinary policy Kagan exonerated Tribe and Ogletree of any malfeasance.
In other words, like a good liberal activist judge, she ignored precedent and the plain meaning of relevant texts to create an outcome that struck her fancy.
The copycat cases came to light in the Fall of 2004. Ogletree was busted first for his book, part history part personal memoir, All Deliberate Speed.
Kagan and Obama both taught at the University of Chicago Law School in the early 1990s.
In her current job, Kagan represents the US government and defends acts of Congress before the Supreme Court and decides when to appeal lower court rulings.
Kagan has the high task of following Stevens, who leaves a legacy that includes the preservation of abortion rights, protection of consumer rights and limits on the death penalty and executive power. He used his seniority and his smarts to form majority votes.
Kagan later joined a challenge to the law allowing colleges to be stripped of federal money if they kept out the military recruiters. But the Supreme Court upheld the law unanimously.
Link
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Ogletree told the Boston Globe that he would face disciplinary action but neither he nor Kagan’s spokeswoman would specify it.
Kagan said in a statement that Olgetree was guilty of “a serious scholarly transgression.”
But Ogletree was not suspended, which is the minimum that undergraduates and graduates face when they are busted for plagiarism. How seriously then did Kagan really treat this transgression?
Certainly, the statement Ogletree issued, which was “approved” by Harvard according to the Boston Globe, relied on an excuse, unintentional copying, that Harvard Law School’s student handbook explicitly says is not exculpatory. “Students who submit work that is not their own, without clear attribution of all sources, even if the omission is inadvertent will be subject to disciplinary action.”
As the controversy festered, Harvard Law School professor Larry Tribe, a party line liberal, came to Ogletree’s defense.
[snip]
A law professor who read about Tribe’s defense tipped off The Weekly Standard that Tribe’s 1985 book, G0d Save This Honourable Court, had purloined quite a bit from University of Virgina emeritus professor Henry Abraham’s acclaimed 1974 book, Justice and Presidents.
In a humongous article posted on the magazine’s website September 24 Joseph Bottum documented multiple passages from Tribe’s book, the bible for liberals who Borked Robert Bork in 1987 when he was nominated for the Supreme Court in 1987, that were clearly lifted from Abraham’s.
One phrase was taken verbatim. “Taft publicly pronounced Pitney to be a � weak member’ of the court.”
Many others were virtually identical.
[snip]
Tribe quickly issued a non-apology apology. Just like Ogletree he accepted full responsibility for the plagiarism–and then proceeded to say it was all a harmless error.
[snip]
And what was Kagan’s reaction to Tribe’s mea not so culpable? She refused any comment to the Boston Globe and appointed a three person panel to investigate the matter.
In other words, she stonewalled. Why did she need to investigate what Tribe had already admitted? Tribe didn’t challenge any facts in the Weekly Standard opus.
A mere seven months later the panel presented its report to Kagan and then Harvard president Larry Summers.
What did they find? Nobody knows. The report was not released and former Harvard president Derek Bok, one the authors, refused to discuss it when reached by JewishWorldReview.com at home last week.
The only “punishment” Tribe got was a statement by Kagan and Summers that cleared him of any malfeasance.
“The unattributed materials relates more to matters of phrasing than to fundamental ideas,” they said, offering a distinction that would have been irrelevant to Harvard if a student had done the same thing. “We are also firmly convinced that the error was the product of inadvertence rather than intentionality.”
“Nevertheless, we regard the error in question as a significant lapse in proper academic practice.”
A lapse? That’s like saying someone who bounces check didn’t swindle anyone the bum checks were just a lapse in accounting procedures. Or the shoplifter had a lapse in memory when he left the store without paying.
And again, just like Kagan’s statement on Ogletree, if the lapse was so ” significant” why wasn’t Tribe sanctioned?
In a lengthy article for his blog, Massachusetts School of Law Dean Lawrence Velvel said Kagan and Summers should have been axed for their “whitewash.”
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From the World Socialist Website:
She shares that political background with Obama himself, who is two years younger, and worked side by side with her in the early 1990s at the University of Chicago Law School.
Kagan served on the legal staff of the Clinton White House, rising to the position of deputy to the top adviser on domestic policy, Bruce Reed, a representative of the right-wing Democratic Leadership Council. Reed and Kagan worked closely together in drafting the Clinton administration’s welfare reform policy, which led to the abolition of Aid to Families with Dependent Children in 1996.
Clinton nominated Kagan to a position on the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia, the leading appeals court and a frequent staging ground for future Supreme Court nominees. The Senate, then under Republican control and in the wake of the Clinton impeachment trial, refused to vote on Kagan’s nomination, which lapsed when the administration left office. She took a position at Harvard Law School, rising quickly to the position of dean. Her best-known action at Harvard was to recruit several prominent conservatives as law professors.
During this period, her strongest public pronouncement came in a legal brief signed by numerous law professors supporting a ban on military recruiters at major law schools. The ban was imposed because the Pentagon’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy on gays violated the non-discrimination policies of the schools.
Kagan described the inability of gays to serve openly in the military as a “monstrous injustice,” a term which apparently does not apply to such barbarities as the indefinite detention of prisoners without trial or judicial proceeding of any kind, in US facilities like Guantánamo Bay, assassinations ordered by the US president, or the systematic illegal wiretapping of US citizens.
In her confirmation hearing as Solicitor General, Kagan embraced the Bush administration perspective of a global war on terror, in which the entire planet should be considered, from a legal standpoint, part of the battlefield in which the rules of war and military justice could be applied. She later defended the “state secrets privilege,” a legal doctrine that effectively bars suits against illegal government surveillance, and opposed granting habeas corpus rights to prisoners at US facilities in Afghanistan.
On economic policy, like the liberals she will join on the court, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen Breyer and Sonya Sotomayor, Kagan has a distinctly pro-corporate and pro-business record, having served as a paid member of an advisory panel for Goldman Sachs from 2005 to 2008.
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2010/may2010/kaga-m11.shtml
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Charles Ogletree:
Charles Ogletree is a long time friend and mentor to both Michelle and Barack Obama.
It also turns out that Ogletree was a hard core radical with roots in the Maoist influenced Black Panthers movement. It also seems that Ogletree is still a militant leftist and is still called on by the Obamas for advice.
In 1970, Charles Ogletree enrolled at Stanford University near San Francisco, then a major center of black activism. Ogletree became a campus radical, organizing an Afrocentric dormitory and editing a campus Black Panthers newspaper called The Real News. He also traveled to Africa and Cuba with student activist groups. In 1973 Ogletree was president of the radical Black Student Union.
Ogletree’s first interest in the law came when he attended the trial of Black Power activist and then Communist Party USA member Angela Davis.
By 1986 Ogletree was director of Harvard’s introduction to trial advocacy workshops, where students were taught that law can be “an instrument for social and political change…a tool to empower the dispossessed and disenfranchised… and a means to make the privileged more respectful of differences,“
Ogletree also began a Saturday School Program so that “African-American students could learn from other professionals of their own heritage“. Barack Obama became one of his regular students.
Ogletree claims to have mentored mentored both Michelle and Barack Obama during their time at Harvard. According to Ogletree the Obama’s have called on him for advice since that time.
“I met Michelle when she started her legal career here at Harvard in the fall of 1985, and I was able to watch her develop into a very strong and powerful student leader. She was an active member of the Harvard Legal Aid Bureau, where she served as a student attorney for indigent clients who had civil cases and needed legal help…”
”
I was faculty adviser to the Harvard Black Law Student Association. I routinely gave career advice, and often personal advice, to students who would come in with questions about where they should work, how they should use their legal skills and talent, and was it possible to do well and do good…My advice to people like Barack and Michelle was that they could easily navigate the challenges of a corporate career and find a variety of ways to serve their community—through financial support, through volunteer legal services, and through getting involved in community efforts. So this advice started then, and I guess it must have been useful enough. They have not hesitated to call on me over the past 20-plus years as needed.(More……)
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Larry Summers:
Lawrence Henry (“Larry”) Summers (b. 1954) is an economist who served as the Secretary of the Treasury in the final year and a half of the Clinton administration. From there he was selected to be the 27th President of Harvard University, considered to be the top position in academia. Lawrence Summers currently is the Director of the White House‘s National Economic Council (NEC) for President Barack Obama.
He served as President of Harvard from 2001 to 2006, when he was forced to resign for merely suggesting that the wide disparities between men and women in science, math and engineering may be due to innate differences in their aptitude or preference for those fields. His mere suggestion of this, delivered in a speech to academics, caused an uproar by liberals that led to his ouster.
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Kagan, who is unmarried, was born in New York City. She holds a bachelor’s degree from Princeton, a master’s degree from Oxford and a law degree from Harvard.
She served as a Supreme Court clerk for one of her legal heroes, Justice Thurgood Marshall. And before that, she clerked for federal appeals court judge Abner Mikva, who later became an important political mentor to Obama in Chicago.
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The jury is still out on this one:
Well know to Obama with ties to the University of Chicago Law School.
Ties to Charles Ogletree; radical activist charged with plagarism under Kagan and Summers watch.
Ties to Abner Mikva; clerked for Mikva an important political advisor to Obama.
Ties to Larry Summers an Economic Advisor to Obama (Previous President of Harvard).
Kagan was a paid member of an advisory panel for Goldman Sachs from 2005 to 2008.
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