Documents Shed Light on Kagan's Opinions

This may help in the difficult quest to find out what Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan actually believes: CBS News has obtained documents that Elena Kagan wrote as a clerk for the late Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall in the late 1980s. They reveal her opinions on a variety of issues: For example, advising Marshall on a case in which a prisoner wanted the state to pay for her abortion, Kagan worried that the Court would rule against the woman and, "This case is likely to become the vehicle that this court uses to create some very bad law on abortion and/or prisoners' rights.” She also called a school desegregation plan “amazingly sensible”; and on a gun-rights case, she wrote, “I am not sympathetic.” In her solicitor general hearings before Congress last year, Kagan tried to distance herself from these opinions, saying, "I was a 27-year-old pipsqueak, and I was working for an 80-year-old giant in the law, and a person who, let us be frank, had very strong jurisprudential and legal views.” However, she often wrote in the first person and said things like, “I’d like to reverse Strickland too,” referring to a case in which the Court made it harder for criminals to argue they were denied effective counsel.