Anyone paying attention should already have ample evidence that Elena Kagan has long occupied the far left quintile of the political and legal spectrum. (I summarize some of that evidence in my recent NR essay.) For those still looking for more evidence, I’ll highlight here Kagan’s past membership in the Society of American Law Teachers (“SALT”).

SALT describes itself as “a community of progressive law teachers working for justice, diversity, and academic excellence.” Among its “major accomplishments,” SALT touts that it “oppos[ed] the nominations of Justices Rehnquist, Bork, Kennedy, and Souter to the United States Supreme Court,” and that it submitted amicus briefs defending the “affirmative action” (racial-preference) programs in the Bakke and Grutter v. Bollinger. Among its other activities, SALT says that it was “the first organization to agree to file suit challenging the Solomon Amendment on First Amendment grounds” (one of the claims rejected unanimously by the Supreme Court in FAIR v. Rumsfeld), that it submitted amicus briefs in favor of homosexual rights in Lawrence v. Texas and Boy Scouts of America v. Dale, that it opposed the Military Commission Act, and that it opposed the nomination of Michael Mukasey as Attorney General. As these examples illustrate, since its founding in 1972, SALT has worked to advance the public-policy agenda of the Left.

It turns out that Kagan was a member of SALT from 1993 to 1995 (the year she joined the Clinton White House). In her Senate questionnaire response for her Supreme Court nomination, Kagan notes that, in connection with her unsuccessful nomination to the D.C. Circuit in 1999, she listed her membership in SALT and two other groups; she further states that “I have no current memory of belonging to or participating in these organizations.”

Unlike what Teddy Kennedy and other Democrats tried to do to Justice Alito in connection with his past membership in Concerned Alumni for Princeton (see point 2 here), I am not going to contend that Kagan’s past membership in SALT proves that she subscribed to each of the positions that it took while she was a member, or that she was motivated to join by each of the positions that it had previously taken, or that she is lying about not remembering belonging to SALT. I will simply observe that the only sensible explanation for her membership in SALT is that she generally shared its leftist vision. (Because she evidently has no memory of not renewing her membership in SALT, it seems implausible that she parted ways with SALT in 1995 for ideological reasons.)