Elena Kagan, Solicitor General, has been confirmed by the Senate to serve as an Associate Justice of the highest court in the nation. Ms. Kagan was previously a policy advisor and Associate White House Council in the Clinton Administration, and most recently Dean of Harvard Law School. While there can be no disputing that she has considerable experience in the court room, as a judge she has no experience to speak of.

From what is known of the Solicitor General, one can deduce that her political opinions running roughly parallel to that of President Obama. Her views lean to the left, and also like Obama, she is quite proud of her beliefs. Many on the conservative side of the spectrum view excessively liberal judges (liberal social activist judges, more specifically) with an anxiously watchful eye; continuously searching for signs of policy creation rather than policy interpretation. They view such activism as a corruption of our system of checks and balances, and a grave threat to the liberty and freedom they hold so dearly. A fair amount of this concern is unfounded - there have been liberal judges as long as there have been liberals willing to elect or appoint them to their respective judgeships, and our system of government has largely survived intact. Be that as it may, danger does exist in this appointment and others, but it lies elsewhere. The real danger is borne out through the fact that Ms. Kagan has never before been a judge in any court. She has precisely zero experience and zero mental training in the difficult task of separating her personal beliefs and life-long convictions from objective adjudication.

Any self-respecting and honorable judges strive daily to maintain their objectivity, if not continuously improve it. Objective interpretation of the law - in this case the Constitution of the United States - is the badge of honor distinguishing a judge worthy of his or her gavel. Such a skill is not acquired overnight. Considering that, how could we possibly expect to see such a difficult to acquire trait exhibited by a person who has no prior experience as a judge? We’d be foolish to demand such and even more foolish to expect it. We could no sooner expect a person who has never before played a round of golf to one day suddenly make the cut for the PGA Tour! That’s just not how things work in the real world.

So with that said, when we examine Elena Kagan’s worthiness for a life-long appointment to the Supreme Court, it is not her personal beliefs that should give us pause, but her inability (as a normal human being lacking decades of mental training and practice) to effectively separate her personal beliefs from her legal rulings and interpretations. Separating one’s feelings from one’s interpretation of a law is a most unnatural act. Only through many years of practice can such a skill truly be refined to any reliable degree.