PROF. JACOBSON: So Why Am I Already Defending Elena Kagan? “If Elena Kagan were a liberal legal hero, with a long record of reaching the correct conclusions from the left-wing perspective, no one on the left would care about Kagan’s hiring record as Dean of Harvard Law School. That hiring record, by all accounts, included an almost unprecedented commitment to intellectual diversity, including the hiring of several prominent conservative legal scholars. . . . So why am I defending Kagan? Because the line of attack being used by the left against Kagan is very familiar. Facts are twisted, conclusions are drawn, and charges are made of racial insensitivity or outright racism, for political purposes. We see this all the time, but usually the targets are conservatives, or health care protesters, or Tea Party followers.I definitely will not say, ‘first they came for Elena Kagan,’ because she is far from first. There is a long line of decent, fair-minded, non-racist people who came before her.”