Kagan for SCOTUS?

I am no expert on such things, but Elena Kagan, Obama's presumptive pick to replace retiring Justice John Paul Stevens, seems somewhat underqualified for the job. As Powerline notes:

She has no judging experience.

She has little experience as a practicing lawyer.

She has approximately one year of experience as Solicitor General of the United States.

She has lots of experience in academia, but has published only a small amount of scholarly work, none of which seems particularly noteworthy.

More here and here. Since she has no judicial experience (in fairness, President Clinton nominated her for the federal bench in 1999, but she did not receive an up or down vote -- a black mark on the GOP in my view); one would naturally turn to her career as a practicing lawyer. But her experience is thin in that area too -- according, for whatever it's worth, to Wikipedia, prior to being chosen to be Obama's Solicitor General, in January 2009, she had never argued a case at trial.

Since she has spent some 20 years in legal academia, one might look to her scholarship for signs of brilliance. According to Paul Campos, a law professor at UC Boulder, there isn't much there, either.

Yesterday, I read everything Elena Kagan has ever published. It didn't take long: in the nearly 20 years since Kagan became a law professor, she's published very little academic scholarship—three law review articles, along with a couple of shorter essays and two brief book reviews. Somehow, Kagan got tenure at Chicago in 1995 on the basis of a single article in The Supreme Court Review—a scholarly journal edited by Chicago's own faculty—and a short essay in the school's law review. She then worked in the Clinton administration for several years before joining Harvard as a visiting professor of law in 1999.
While there she published two articles, but since receiving tenure from Harvard in 2001 (and becoming dean of the law school in 2003) she has published nothing. (While it's true law school deans often do little scholarly writing during their terms, Kagan is remarkable both for how little she did in the dozen years prior to becoming Harvard's dean, and for never having written anything intended for a more general audience, either before or after taking that position.)

[SNIP]

(Of course cynics have noted that today Supreme Court nominees are often better off not having an extensive "paper trail" regarding their views on controversial legal issues. Who would have guessed it would be possible to retain this virtue while obtaining tenure at two of the nation's top law schools?)

At least in theory Kagan could compensate somewhat for the slenderness of her academic resume through the quality of her work. But if Kagan is a brilliant legal scholar, the evidence must be lurking somewhere other than in her publications. Kagan's scholarly writings are lifeless, dull, and eminently forgettable. They are, on the whole, cautious academic exercises in the sort of banal on-the-other-handing whose prime virtue is that it's unlikely to offend anyone in a position of power.

Of course, when Clarence Thomas was nominated for the Court, people said he was not qualified, and it is true that he had not written very much. And when President George HW Bush said he was the "most qualified" person for the job, that was stretching it. But he had been Assistant Secretary for Civil Rights at the US Dept. of Education, and Chairman of the EEOC, served as a state prosecutor and a federal judge (albeit for only 19 months) and had briefly worked as an in-house counsel for a multinational corporation, giving him at least some experience in most if not all of the facets of the law (criminal, civil, administrative, constitutional) that the Supreme Court regularly faces. That's something you can't say about Elena Kagan.

More to the point, anyone who has read Justice Thomas's opinions would have to admit, that he has demonstrated that he is every bit the equal (to put it mildly) of his colleagues on the Court. Perhaps Ms. Kagan will do the same.

[UPDATE] Two more favorable views about Kagan and her legal scholarship over at the law-professor-blog Volokh Conspiracy from Jonathan Adler of Case Wesetern U and Ilya Somin of George Mason. I am not terribly famliar with Professor Somin, but Adler is solid on legal issues, and has strong libertarian political leanings, and all of the VC contributors are worth taking seriously.