Military Recruitment to Affect SCOTUS Pick?

![](http://media3.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/photo/2010/04/17/PH2010041702766.jpg "Solicitor General Elena Kagan")

Kagan "lamented" that military recruiters were at Harvard while Dean of the Law School (Jose Luis Magana/AP)

As President Obama draws closer to selecting his nominee to replace retiring Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens, [*The New Republic*](http://www.tnr.com/article/kagan-revolution) and*[The Huffington Post](http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/04/09/elena-kagan-emerging-as-s_n_532319.html)*have both argued that Solicitor General Elena Kagan is emerging as the possible front-runner for the nomination. However, her stance on military recruitment – an issue covered at Stanford by *[The Stanford Review](http://www.stanfordreview.org)*this year – may give Republicans fodder to oppose her nomination.

Goldstein wrote in *The New Republic *piece that

Thus, no Republican Senator has been materially critical of either Kagan or Garland. To the contrary, Republicans have been sending signals that neither would generate an enormous fight. I think that she would receive only 65 votes and he would receive ten to 20 more, but both would be confirmed without a significant disruption in the Senate’s business.

Kagan is perceived as more moderate than other potential nominees like Judge Diane Wood (though not as centrist as Judge Merrick Garland), and “liberals worry that, by choosing her, the administration would miss the opportunity to elevate a genuine progressive.”

However, one issue may provide an opening to oppose Kagan: military recruitment.

The Washington Post reports in an April 18 article:

Four months after becoming dean of Harvard Law School, Elena Kagan sent an e-mail to students and faculty lamenting that military recruiters had arrived on campus, once again, in violation of the school’s anti-discrimination policy. But under government rules, she wrote, the entire university would jeopardize its federal aid unless the law school helped the recruiters, despite the armed forces’ ban on openly gay members.

Kagan may simply be the Stanford-of-the-East (read: Harvard) version of an issue that The Stanford Review‘s Autumn Carter covered earlier this year. In February, Carter reported that Stanford law professors urged law students not meet with military recruiters on campus as way to protest “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy. Read the article for more information on Stanford’s experience and find out more about the issue that could play a role in SCOTUS confirmation hearings.

Campus Reform also interviewed Carter here for her work on military recruiting.