My essay on the Kagan nomination from the current issue of National Review is now available online here. Some of it will be familiar to regular readers of Bench Memos, but there’s also a good amount that’s new, and I hope that you’ll find that it provides a useful comprehensive overview.

I wrote the essay nearly three weeks ago, so it doesn’t include any of the material that I’ve developed since then, including Kagan’s strange and disturbing acclaim of Israeli justice Aharon Barak as “my judicial hero” and her defense (in her graduate thesis) of judges who “mold and steer the law in order to promote certain ethical values and achieve certain social ends” that they favor.

Correction: I state in the article that Kagan “had never argued in any court before becoming solicitor general last year.” She had never argued any appeals. But her questionnaire response indicates that as a junior associate in private practice she did argue one summary-judgment motion in one case and two motions—“to compel release [to the public of certain] transcripts and to prevent redaction”—in another. My broader point about her lack of real-world legal experience is unaffected by this correction.