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Harvard Dean, Chosen as Solicitor General, Goes Before Senators 

When Harvard Law School hosted a huge dinner a few years ago for the conservative Federalist Society, the school's dean, Elena Kagan, received such long and enthusiastic applause that she felt compelled to hold up her arms in mock protest.

"You are not my people," she said to laughter -- and more applause.

Kagan will try to retain the reputation as the liberal whom conservatives could like when the Senate Judiciary Committee today considers her nomination to become the nation's solicitor general, the "10th justice" who represents the government before the Supreme Court and the nation's appeals courts. . . .

She clerked at the Supreme Court for Justice Thurgood Marshall, whom she described after his death as "the most important -- and probably the greatest -- lawyer of the 20th century." Except for a two-year stint in the Washington offices of Williams & Connolly, she has spent her career in government and academia, and has a prominent gap in her deep résumé: She has never argued a case at the Supreme Court or in any appeals court.

Instead, she taught law at the University of Chicago, where she was part of a group that tried to interest a part-time constitutional law lecturer named Barack Obama in committing to a full-time life in academia. She joined the Clinton administration, first as an associate counsel and then as a domestic policy adviser. "Wonderwonk" was the title of the article the New Republic wrote about her role when the administration worked with Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) to try to give the government more regulatory power over tobacco.

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