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The Supreme Court agreed to expand the time allotted for the much-anticipated argument Sept. 9 in Citizens United v. FEC.
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U.S. Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens, a one-time centrist maverick who became a powerful leader of the Court's liberal wing, announced his retirement on April 9, just 11 days short of his 90th birthday.
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Washington's spin machine cycled into high gear, churning out a new set of names as possible contenders to fill Justice John Paul Stevens' seat on the U.S. Supreme Court.
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The retirement of Justice John Paul Stevens is focusing attention on a group of familiar candidates for the U.S. Supreme Court.
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Although a new Obama-appointed justice may vote the same way Stevens would in most cases, the stakes are high because of Stevens' role as a crucial strategist within the Court.
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Washington's spin machine cycled into high gear, churning out a new set of names as possible contenders to fill Justice John Paul Stevens' seat on the U.S. Supreme Court.
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The lobbying over Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens' successor is picking up, as interest groups push from the outside for their preferred candidates and senators prepare to offer their own recommendations to the White House.
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Neither SCOTUSblog founder Thomas Goldstein nor Jenner & Block associate Lindsay Harrison expect President Barack Obama to engage in a major political battle with Republicans over his nominee to replace retiring Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens. Speaking at the Catholic University of America Columbus School of Law on a Wednesday panel discussion, both lawyers predicted Solicitor General Elena Kagan would be nominated.
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The drumbeat of Kagan criticism may get louder as scrutiny of her brief record as solicitor general intensifies. Advocates for human rights and other liberal causes who are upset at the Obama administration for continuing Bush-era policies may take their frustration out on Kagan.
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More than any other time in recent memory, the drumbeat of politicians and pundits alike against naming another federal appeals court judge to the Supreme Court is running high.
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One of Solicitor General Elena Kagan's assets as a potential Supreme Court nominee is said to be her collegiality across the political spectrum. That bonhomie was on full display Thursday as she heaped praise on Justice Anthony Kennedy at an award ceremony put on by Georgetown University Law Center's Supreme Court Institute.
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After sending out signals late last week that President Barack Obama was still some distance away from making a decision, the White House on Monday indicated that an announcement of a new Supreme Court nominee may come this week.
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Sen. Jon Kyl (R-Ariz.) voted to confirm Elena Kagan as solicitor general, but the Senate’s No. 2 Republican said today that he would not necessarily support her for the Supreme Court.
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Additional reaction from special interest groups, academics and politicians.
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The vice president's chief of staff said the nominee is "clearly a legal progressive" whose "pragmatic perspective" will be an important addition to the Court.
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Judges, attorneys and scholars attending a litigation conference at Duke University School of Law took a break from the jam-packed agenda to weigh in on the Kagan nomination.
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A flood of interest groups and advocates are reacting to the Kagan nomination. Everyone from the liberal Center for American Progress to the conservative Judicial Crisis Network has released a statement.
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Several conservative groups unleashed strong criticism of Obama's nomination of Kagan, signalling that, as expected, her support for banning military recruiters from Harvard because of a ban on openly gay servicemembers will be a rallying point for them.
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Battle lines formed quickly Monday after President Barack Obama announced that he was nominating Solicitor General Elena Kagan to replace retiring Justice John Paul Stevens on the U.S. Supreme Court.
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NBC News confirmed Sunday night that President Obama plans to nominate Solicitor General Elena Kagan to replace retiring Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens.
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President Obama is expected to announce his choice of Solicitor General Elena Kagan as the replacement for retiring Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens at the White House with Kagan at his side Monday morning, with the goal of Senate confirmation hearings before the end of June.
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President Barack Obama made a round of phone calls beginning at 8 p.m. Sunday after deciding to nominate Solicitor General Elena Kagan to the Supreme Court, an administration official said. The final decision to nominate Kagan came late enough that, throughout the weekend, the White House’s confirmation team worked on plans to introduce any of multiple candidates.
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If nominee Elena Kagan is confirmed to the U.S. Supreme Court, the nine-member body will be made up entirely of judges educated at either Harvard Law School or Yale Law School. While legal academics agreed that it is unusual to have such a homogenous group on the court at the same time, there was no consensus as to what that means.
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Several news profiles in recent days have intimated that Elena Kagan has had her eye on a Supreme Court seat almost since high school, and that her longstanding reticence about taking strong stands on issues may have been calculated to help smooth her path. But that degree of foresight can't have been at work in 1995 when she wrote a review of a book on the sorry state of Supreme Court confirmation hearings.
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The American Bar Association will begin to evaluate Solicitor General Kagan's qualifications for a seat on the Supreme Court, said ABA president Carolyn Lamm.
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The two year-stint that Elena Kagan worked as a young lawyer at Williams & Connelly is likely to get scrutiny from Senate Republicans over the next three months, as they evaluate Kagan's nomination to the Supreme Court. Kagan's time at the small but elite Washington law firm represents almost the entirety of her litigation experience prior to her confirmation as solicitor general last year.
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Just days after President Obama announced he will nominate Elena Kagan to the Supreme Court, speculation is already swirling about who will replace her as solicitor general, with names including Washington state Gov. Christine Gregoire reportedly on a White House short list for the post.
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Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan started a day of meetings with senators in the friendly office of Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.), with the two facing the press in a carefully choreographed setting, but not taking questions.
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Activists and lawmakers are actively courting Tea Party groups to weigh in on Elena Kagan's nomination to the U.S. Supreme Court. Tea Party coordinators this week said they're still assessing Kagan's nomination, and it isn't yet apparent whether it will become a priority for them.
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Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan has one fewer item to answer on her Senate Judiciary Committee questionnaire than Justice Sonia Sotomayor had last year: the one about previous judicial office.
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Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan won a significant endorsement Friday from appellate practitioner Miguel Estrada, a conservative whose own nomination for an appeals court seat languished and died at the hands of Senate Democrats in 2003.
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A flood of interest groups and advocates reacted to President Obama's nomination of Elena Kagan to the U.S. Supreme Court last week.
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To help guide U.S. Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan through the confirmation process, the White House has turned to Susan Davies, a former Senate Judiciary Committee lawyer who prepped Justice Sonia Sotomayor for her hearings last summer. Fresh off a promotion to deputy White House counsel, Davies helped Kagan navigate Capitol Hill last week.
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President Barack Obama last week presented U.S. Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan as one of the nation's "foremost legal minds." But is the former Harvard Law dean actually scholar-lite? Kagan's small body of scholarship at Chicago and Harvard comes under scrutiny for lacking personal opinion.
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In her year as Solicitor General, Elena Kagan was confident, despite tangles with Chief Justice John Roberts, and a defeat in Citizens United. Lawyers interviewed last week were uniformly positive in their appraisal of her oral advocacy.
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This summer, at least two law professors -- Michael Gerhardt and Orin Kerr -- will reprise the roles they had last year in advising the Senate Judiciary Committee about a Supreme Court nomination.
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It was a newsy morning at the Supreme Court on Monday, with four rulings, including a victory for the United States in a case argued by Solicitor General Kagan.
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Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan's answers to a background questionnaire have arrived on Capitol Hill.
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Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan submitted her answers Tuesday to a background questionnaire from the Senate Judiciary Committee — opening windows into her year as solicitor general, her finances, and the nominating process. Kagan disclosed that, in the weeks before her nomination, she sat down on at least two occasions with lawyers from Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom.
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Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) announced that the confirmation hearing for Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan will start June 28, giving senators and their staffs about six weeks to prepare.
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Elena Kagan's estimated net worth grew 74 percent during her year as solicitor general, records show, despite taking a hefty paycut when she left her position as dean of Harvard Law School.
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Elena Kagan is making steady progress building support among senators as she heads into her third week as a U.S. Supreme Court nominee.
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Researchers are combing through sources as varied as policy memos Kagan wrote while part of the Clinton administration, her student theses, and documents related to her job as solicitor general to glean her views on a host of hot-button issues.
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As part of the White House’s ongoing effort to build support for Elena Kagan, a Harvard Law School assistant dean and graduates holding public interest jobs briefed the media Tuesday on Kagan’s expansion of public service opportunities when she was dean. But it was a former Harvard Federalist Society president, now a Republican political consultant, who captured most of the spotlight.
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During his keynote address at the second annual Judge Thomas A. Flannery Lecture in Washington, Justice Antonin Scalia said that he was "pleased to see the most recent nominee come from outside the federal judiciary and indeed the judiciary as a whole."
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Sen. Arlen Specter (D-Pa.) has told Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan what issues he plans to raise at her confirmation hearing next month: compensation for victims of the Holocaust and the 9/11 terrorist attacks, as well as warrantless wiretapping.
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The American Bar Association's Standing Committee on the Federal Judiciary is well into its in-depth investigation into the record of Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan, which will be presented to the Senate Judiciary Committee for its hearing later this month.
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The Clinton Presidential Library & Museum today posted online some of the long-awaited documents related to Elena Kagan's work in the White House in the 1990s.
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Former acting solicitor general Walter Dellinger said today that Elena Kagan's work for civil rights and Democratic icons should alleviate any concerns about her among liberals.
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As the National Archives prepares to release another trove of Elena Kagan's records, the top Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee said he's ready to ask for a delay in Kagan's confirmation hearing if all records aren’t released soon.
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As associate White House counsel in 1995, U.S. Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan played a key role in building a public defense of President Bill Clinton’s claim of attorney-client privilege in a potential confrontation with Congress over a subpoena from the Senate committee investigating Whitewater, a failed Arkansas real estate venture.
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More than 75,000 pages of Clinton White House e-mails sent by or to Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan in the 1990s were posted on the Clinton Library Web site, setting off a needle-in-a-haystack scramble for interesting nuggets, along with partisan quibbling over the timing and quantity of the release.
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All the former U.S. solicitors general since 1985 today joined in endorsing current SG Elena Kagan in advance of her Senate confirmation hearing, set to begin June 28.
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Twenty-nine former Supreme Court clerks who served with nominee Elena Kagan during the 1987-88 Supreme Court term added their voices Wednesday to the White House’s roll-out of support for Kagan’s confirmation.
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The U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee has released a new financial disclosure report for Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan, showing she received a final stipend last year for serving on a Goldman Sachs advisory council.
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Failed U.S. Supreme Court nominee and former judge Robert Bork said today that Elena Kagan's admiration of an Israeli judge is "disqualifying in and of itself" for Kagan's own nomination to the Court.
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The committee of the American Bar Association that rates judicial nominees has added its voice to the evaluation of Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan, rating her well-qualified.
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With just days to go before Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan's Senate confirmation hearing, she is still an unfamiliar figure to most Americans, according to a poll released today by C-SPAN.
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Many assume that if confirmed as a Supreme Court justice, Elena Kagan's votes on the Court will come out pretty much the same way as those of her predecessor John Paul Stevens. But two separate reports issued Wednesday suggest that Kagan may part company with Stevens in cases involving religious liberty.
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Sen. Jack Reed (D-R.I.) and Harvard Law School student Kurt White, a decorated Iraq war veteran, joined in a press conference this morning to counter Republican assertions that Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan was hostile to the military as dean of the law school.
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President Barack Obama's top political strategist acknowledged today the administration is facing an uphill battle in its effort to win Republican votes for Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan, but he said that doesn't mean Kagan will stop trying.
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Elena Kagan had never argued in an appellate court prior to her confirmation as solicitor general. She apparently has enjoyed it.
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Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan won't give her opening statement to the Senate Judiciary Committee until late this afternoon, but the White House has released a few excerpts of what she's planning to say.
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Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) opened Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan's confirmation hearing today with a defense of her future independence.
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Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.) is drawing on public discontent with Washington as he makes an argument for a more conservative Supreme Court.
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Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) was the only Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee to support the nomination of Justice Sonia Sotomayor a year ago. Today, he continued to drop hints that he might be willing to vote for Elena Kagan, too.
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The front row of Elena Kagan's confirmation hearing is filled with some of the top lawyers in the Obama administration.
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The Senate Judiciary chairman discusses his preparation for the hearing, what he plans to ask the U.S. solicitor general and why questions about Kagan's personal life should be off-limits.
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Elena Kagan sought to position herself Monday as someone who would be a neutral arbiter if confirmed as a justice on the U.S. Supreme Court, defying hopes from the political left and right that she would outline a clear judicial philosophy during her confirmation hearing.
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The Supreme Court is losing some its geographic diversity as Elena Kagan prepares to become the fourth sitting justice from New York City, replacing Illinois native Justice John Paul Stevens. Members of the Senate Judiciary Committee have noticed.
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In a 1995 law review article, Elena Kagan had a few choice things to say about Supreme Court confirmation hearings. They had become, in her view, a “vapid and hollow charade.” We've collected a few low moments from past confirmation hearings, mined from the archives by our Supreme Court reporting team.
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The National Law Journal's photo editor, Diego M. Radzinschi, has been covering the confirmation hearing of Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan.
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When it came time for her to question Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan, Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) took on two of the most emotional issues that come before the Court.
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The nominee said it’s up to the justices to find a balance between long-standing antitrust precedent and changing views on the economic impact of antitrust laws.
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Kagan repeated today her view on allowing television coverage of Supreme Court oral arguments: She's in favor.
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The top Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee followed through today on plans to press Elena Kagan about her handling of military recruiting while dean of Harvard Law School.
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U.S. Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan attempted Tuesday to defuse Republican concerns about her approach to constitutional law and her actions as Harvard Law School dean.
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As Justice Sonia Sotomayor did a year ago, Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan backed away today from President Barack Obama's statements about the role of empathy in judging.
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On Monday, we noted some of the top Obama administration lawyers who joined Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan for her confirmation hearing. Others came today.
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Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan opened the second day of her confirmation hearing today by embracing the language of conservatives, even as she left plenty of room for how she would interpret the U.S. Constitution.
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Kagan repeated today her view on allowing television coverage of Supreme Court oral arguments: She's in favor.
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The top Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee followed through today on plans to press Elena Kagan about her handling of military recruiting while dean of Harvard Law School.
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When it came time for her to question Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan, Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) took on two of the most emotional issues that come before the Court.
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Sen. Al Franken (D-Minn.), who has emerged as a major ally of plaintiffs' lawyers, railed today against Supreme Court decisions on arbitration, which is one of their lobby's top targets. He did not push to elicit Elena Kagan's opinion on the subject.
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The comparison between judging and baseball umpiring, popularized by Chief Justice John Roberts Jr. during his 2005 confirmation hearing, is popping up again.
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Solicitor General Elena Kagan has drawn some criticism for her office's position in U.S. v. Stevens, a case about so-called "crush videos" that depict acts of animal cruelty.
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Sen. Arlen Specter (D-Pa.), a perennial wildcard in Supreme Court confirmation hearings, cut short a line of questioning to nominee Elena Kagan today after he said she was not giving him substantive answers.
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Members of the Senate Judiciary Committee questioning Elena Kagan on Wednesday frequently found themselves in sharp disagreement with the U.S. Supreme Court nominee, who continued to resist attempts to define her views.
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The nominee said it's up to the justices to find a balance between long-standing antitrust precedent and changing views on the economic impact of antitrust laws.
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As Justice Sonia Sotomayor did a year ago, Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan backed away today from President Barack Obama's statements about the role of empathy in judging.
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As lawmakers try to hammer out a compromise on overhauling regulation of financial markets, Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan said today their power to do so has few limits.
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Conventional wisdom holds that Elena Kagan revealed little but a knack for empty platitudes during her U.S. Supreme Court confirmation hearing. She simply followed a script, commentators said — a script that nominees for two decades have used and that she slammed in a 1995 law review article.But the popular analysis misses a lot that Kagan did tell the nation.
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Indicating there's little chance she would recuse from the issue if confirmed, Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan says she did not advise the Obama administration on the constitutionality of its healthcare overhaul.
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Elena Kagan continued along the path Tuesday to confirmation to the U.S. Supreme Court, clearing with ease a vote by the Senate Judiciary Committee. Kagan's nomination now heads to the full Senate, where a final vote is likely sometime in the next three weeks.
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The U.S. Chamber of Commerce will not take a position on the nomination of Solicitor General Elena Kagan to the Supreme Court.
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As they debate whether to confirm Elena Kagan to the U.S. Supreme Court, senators are once again revisiting whether she has enough legal experience to serve as a justice.
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Senators recited a litany of compliments and complaints this morning as they kicked off their debate on whether to confirm Solicitor General Elena Kagan to the U.S. Supreme Court.
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Elena Kagan,just confirmed by the U.S. Senate, will be sworn in at the Supreme Court on Saturday, the Court has just announced. Chief Justice John Roberts Jr. will do the honors.
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Following a 63-37 Senate vote to confirm, Elena Kagan is set to be sworn in Saturday as a U.S. Supreme Court justice. For the first time in its history, the Court will have three female justices. Kagan will be the Court's youngest member, so her influence may be felt for decades.
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