The Sphinx
Why the inscrutable Elena Kagan makes everyone nervous.
By Dahlia Lithwick
Posted Monday, May 10, 2010, at 2:01 PM ET

Supreme Court nominee Elena KaganNow that Elena Kagan is officially the White House's Supreme Court nominee, pundits have launched themselves into their CSI-worthy project of sorting through tiny filaments of evidence for her true ideological views. With no judicial record to pore over, and some of the wonkiest law-review articles ever penned to her credit, Kagan has mastered the fine art of nearly perfect ideological inscrutability. Even Jeffrey Toobin, her law school study partner, has virtually no idea what she really believes. That only makes us more determined to sift through the dry-cleaning slips and the Post-it notes to try to guess at who the real Elena Kagan might be. And since she has been hard to know, we struggle to find someone else we might compare her to. Paul Campos, a law professor at the University of Colorado, has (fairly ridiculously) compared Kagan to Harriet Miers. Andrew Cohen has compared her to Chief Justice John Roberts.