...and Elena Kagan's to be the new SG

More kudos: President Elect-Barack Obama has just nominated Harvard Law Dean Elena Kagan to be the lead government lawyer before the U.S. Supreme Court.
Kagan, who would be the 1st woman Solicitor General of the United States, was a law clerk to Justice Thurgood Marshall, himself the 1st African-American person to serve as SG.
IntLawGrrls mentioned Kagan this summer, in a post on the annual meeting of the American Constitution Society that also mentioned our guest alumna Dawn Johnsen, who, as described above, has just been named to head the Office of Legal Counsel. In that post we wrote:

Of some concern, though, were comments at a Friday morning panel entitled 'What's At Stake: Law and Justice Policies in a New Administration.' There participants shrank from a suggestion by the moderator, Harvard Law Dean Elena Kagan, that criminal investigation might receive even fleeting contemplation by the new President, who will have the task of making an accounting of official abuse post-9/11. ...

Among her 1st tasks upon confirmation relates to the post-9/11 legal landscape: it is, as detailed in this New York Times article , to prepare and file the government's briefs in the case of Ali Saleh Kahlah al-Marri, the only person designated an "enemy combatant" who is still in Stateside detention.

Heartfelt congratulations, Elena!

Blueprint to bring human rights home

Soon after the election, IntLawGrrl Connie de la Vega posted a moving call for the United States to reaffirm the commitment it made 60 years ago by endorsing the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
Just before the election, the American Constitution Society released a road map on how America might do just that.
In 33 pages, Human Rights at Home: A Domestic Policy Blueprint for the New Administration traces the history of the U.S. commitment and recent shortcomings evident in, for example, the mistreatment of persons detained in the wake of 9/11 and in the failure to protect its own nationals in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. (It's a litany not unlike that which I set forth in this essay, published earlier this year.) The ACS report, written by our colleague Catherine Powell (right) of Fordham Law School, then recommends ways that the new President could set the United States back on a human rights path. A few examples:
► Issue an Executive Order (proposed text at Appendix B) reconstituting the Interagency Working Group on Human Rights, 1st established in 1998, as a means to coordinate federal governmental "promotion and respect of human rights and the implementation of human rights obligations in U.S. domestic policy";
► "Seize opportunities" to act soon to reaffirm obligations the United States already has shouldered by continuing reporting dialogue respecting the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination (subject of an IntLawGrrls series);
► Establish 2 types of human rights bodies, the 1st the Interagency Working Group, which would implement human rights domestically, and the 2d, a new, nonpartisan, independent body that would monitor compliance with human rights laws; and
► Support ratification of human rights treaties, with all necessary implementing legislation, such as, to cite a few examples, the Convention on the Rights of the Child, the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women, the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (also the subject of an IntLawGrrls series), the American Convention on Human Rights, the International Convention for the Protection of All Persons from Enforced Disappearance, and the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights.
I'm proud to have served on the Blueprint Advisory Board along with a host of other academics, NGO representatives, and former government officials, all named in Appendix A.
Looking forward now to seeing some of those recommendations take root here at home.

Opening elections, closing ranks

We fear aliens and disenfranchise nuns.

Thus did Stanford Law Professor Pamela S. Karlan (right) sum up her criticism of laws that block the right to vote.
Karlan took part in a superb panel at this weekend's annual convention of the American Constitution Society. Though founded just 7 years ago, ACS has created a national forum for liberal lawyers and law students. (That's due in no small part to the hard work of folks like Executive Director Lisa Brown (below right); director Dawn Johnsen, an IntLawGrrls guest alumna; and director Patricia Wald (left), formerly Chief Judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia and a Judge of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, and the honoree at ACS' end-of-meeting banquet.) ACS thus provides a counterweight to the Federalist Society, which in the last quarter-century has succeeded in pushing a conservative agenda to the frontline of legal developments in the United States.
ACS' mission was well served by the voting panel. Ron Klain, who led Al Gore's recount bid in 2000, urged every one of the hundreds of lawyers and law students in the audience to do his or her part by volunteering as an election protection worker or election judge for November's general election. Joe Trippi, a presidential campaign aide to Howard Dean in 2004 and John Edwards in 2008, added a global perspective by urging all to go to the Friends of Zimbabwe website and donate toward election protection in that troubled country, which faces a presidential runoff on June 27.
In a word, inspiring.
Of some concern, though, were comments at a Friday morning panel entitled "What's At Stake: Law and Justice Policies in a New Administration." There participants shrank from a suggestion by the moderator, Harvard Law Dean Elena Kagan (below left), that criminal investigation might receive even fleeting contemplation by the new President, who will have the task of making an accounting of official abuse post-9/11.
Now, no one would have expected panelists to sound a clarion call for prosecution. Nor is such a call appropriate at this time. It is likely that resort to the criminal system will prove ill-advised and/or impossible. In any event, consideration of the question must await the new administration's analysis of documents, secret as well as public, in order to find out what in fact happened these last 7 years. By that same reasoning, however, it seems equally premature to close ranks against any single avenue for accountability even before the facts are known.