This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Monday, May 10, 2010. I'm Caleb Brown.

President Obama has named Solicitor General Elina Kagan as his next pick for the U.S. Supreme Court.

Ilia Shapiro, senior fellow at the Cato Institute and editor of the Cato Supreme Court Review, offers

his assessment. She's the first female solicitor general, meaning the government's representative

at the Supreme Court.

Before that, she was the first female dean of Harvard Law School

where she did a wonderful job as an administrator, hired some conservative faculty, promoted

collegiality, built some bridges, improved student life, was just a very good dean and respected

by faculty and others on both sides or all sides of the ideological spectrum.

Before that, she practiced law briefly at a good firm in DC.

Was in the Clinton administration's White House Council's office.

I was a professor at the University of Chicago and Harvard.

Has a distinguished prestigious

record clerk for Thurgood Marshall on the Supreme Court, did a stint in

Oxford anyway you know had a lot of credentials she hasn't published as much as most of her

credentials.

standing. That's probably in part because she was thinking not even in the back of her

mind in her front of her mind that she wanted to be a Supreme Court

Justice or at least a judge and didn't want to write anything that was controversial.

So her few law review articles are strong, but not really indicative of how she'll she would rule on the the hot issues

of the day. All right so we're back to sort of square one for Supreme Court

nominees answering questions vaguely with in some cases deep records

...