Every Friday for the last three weeks the Clinton Library has released tens of thousands of documents from Obama nominee Elena Kagan's time in the Clinton White House. Today's batch was no different: 80,000 plus were released today just before 5 pm, and initial reviews are still in progress. The first read shows a picture consistent with political operative revealed in Kagan's other Clinton-era documents, with disdain for the Second Amendment and the NRA, concern for currying favor with gay and lesbian groups, and support for judges who will decide cases by giving an edge to "the underdog" and interpreting the Constitution as a "living," malleable document.

Another round of documents from Elena Kagan's time in the Clinton White House was released Friday afternoon, giving further evidence of her decidedly liberal legal and policy positions.  The release comes as a Rasmussen poll shows that support for Kagan's nomination to the Supreme Court has fallen to 33% while opposition to her nomination has risen eight points to 41%.  By way of comparison, 28% of the public opposed Harriet Miers’ nomination at the time she withdrew under fire from the process.  The public remains highly engaged in the nomination process, with 73% reporting that they are following the news about Kagan.

Click through for some of the hot topics Kagan-watchers will be talking about based on these newly released documents.

On Friday afternoon the first batch of documents from the Clinton Library were released,  giving the public the first insights into Elena Kagan's work for the Clinton White House.  We made a preliminary review of the documents available Friday evening, but here is an update after a few more days of reading through the nearly 47,000 pages.  There were some interesting items that were not uncovered in the original rush to review so many boxes of documents. This underlines the challenges facing Senators who are struggling to prepare for a hearing scheduled for Kagan on June 28, while more than two-thirds of the documents have not yet been released.

The first dump of documents from Elena Kagan’s years in the Clinton Administration came out today, and already her true colors on a host of hot-button political topics are starting to show through. Click through for a survey of her positions on some major issues: guns, assisted suicide, abortion, welfare reform, cloning, and climate change.

The first dump of documents from Elena Kagan's years in the Clinton Administration came out this afternoon, and already her true colors on a host of hot-button political topics are starting to show through.

With increasing numbers of the public wary of a Kagan confirmation, the left is looking for every possible reason to trumpet her acceptability to conservatives. While Kagan has, wisely, made friends on both sides of the aisle, no conservative thus far has gone so far as to claim she would be anything other than another solid liberal vote on the Court. The latest attempt has been to use Justice Scalia, darling of the right, and his well-known personal fondness for Kagan as an endorsement for her confirmation. But a closer look at his statements reveals that his statements are being stretched beyond their reach.

President Obama should not be surprised that Kagan’s lack of relevant experience is generating controversy. She is one of the most inexperienced Supreme Court nominees in memory, and critics of all political persuasions are right to question President Obama’s motives for nominating such a blank slate. Kagan’s lack of relevant experience is so glaring that it led liberal law professor Paul Campos to compare her to Harriet Miers, the Bush nominee who was attacked by Republicans for her inexperience and inscrutability and by Democrats for being too close to the President. According to the chart below, compiled using data available at the Federal Judicial Center, that comparison might not be far off the mark. Neither Miers nor Kagan had been a judge before being nominated. While Miers and Kagan had spent nearly the same amount of time in government, Miers had been a practicing lawyer for more than a quarter-century longer than Kagan. The only significant experience advantage Kagan had over Miers was in academia. But, as we have explained, her bibliography is thinner than any other tenured Harvard Law professor -- and many of the untenured professors as well.

Elena Kagan has become famous as being the dean that built the ice rink at Harvard Law School. Nostalgic images of skaters laughing and spinning away their exam troubles come to mind - Sleigh Ride, Currier & Ives, and all. In reality, it went almost unused, at least when I was a student, because there was no more than a handful of students who actually owned ice skates and had time between classes to take a jaunt around the rink. (It has since been closed due to budget issues - it was hard to justify the expense given its underuse.) It was a brilliant feel-good political move to reach out to students on campus, but it was almost entirely symbolic.

Elena Kagan’s answers to the Judiciary Committee Questionnaire were made public last night, along with copies of her Princeton and Oxford theses. This is the first view most people are getting of her Oxford thesis, and its theoretical assumptions suggest an approach to law that is decidedly outside the judicial mainstream. At root, Kagan presents judicial reasoning as a cynical game of trying to find legal fig leaves to cover what are fundamentally raw policy preferences or gut instinct. This is the antithesis of the rule of law.