one thing that occurs watching the kagan hearings: i am very glad i have not lived her life. so when they ask her about memos she wrote in the clinton admin, strategizing on avoiding a ban on partial-birth abortion, she's all like 'i was working for a president who had very definite views. my job was to push forward his agenda.' when she was dean at harvard law school and sought to exclude military recruiters on the grounds of 'don't ask/don't tell,' she was only trying to enforce the 25-year-old non-discrimination policy, not embodying any particular position. as solicitor general she argued that prisoners of the u.s. in afghanistan and iraq do not have habeus corpus rights. we should make no assumptions about her own opinion on this matter: she was representing her client. as a supreme court justice all she will do is read and apply the constitution/laws as they stand, without regard to her own opinions.

it must be hard to live a life in which you are never permitted to think independently. one might be tempted to call it a slavish life, and to boot, an unintelligent or at least incurious life, though these would be odd things to say about so eminent and famously smart etc person. really i think that an institution that demands at least the simulation of automatism of this kind is profoundly dehumanizing; it ought to begin to make one sceptical of bureaucratic and in particular legal institutions; they rest on a lie, or a demand of total inauthenitcity. if i was sitting there with the purpose of completely disguising even the sheer fact that i have opinions, i would feel compromised, sullied.