Supreme Court Nominee Kagan Has King Hall Connection
Solicitor General Elena Kagan, the former dean of Harvard Law School who has been nominated by President Obama to succeed retiring Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens, has a connection to King Hall that includes participation in a 1996 UC Davis Law Review Symposium and publication of one of her relatively few scholarly articles in the UC Davis Law Review.
Largely on the initiative of Associate Dean Vikram Amar and Professor Alan Brownstein, Kagan was invited to participate in the 1996 Law Review Symposium, "Developments in Free Speech Doctrine: Charting the Nexus Between Speech and Religion, Abortion, and Equality," which was devoted to scholarship examining then-recent free speech cases.
Kagan's article "When a Speech Code Is a Speech Code: The Stanford Policy and the Theory of Incidental Restraints," is a critical response to another article presented at the symposium, "How to Write a Speech Code without Really Trying: Reflections on the Stanford Experience" by Thomas A. Grey, a professor at Stanford Law School.
Grey had been involved in drafting a Stanford policy that attempted to specify the kinds of speech that could be treated by the university as discriminatory harassment. The policy, put into effect in 1990, was overturned in a 1995 trial court decision. Grey's article "defends the policy on the basis of the distinction prevalent in First Amendment law between direct and incidental restraints on expression," writes Kagan, who argues that the policy "constitutes the very opposite of the usual incidental restraint: a specific and considered judgment of the desirability of restricting certain expression."