From NBC Chicago:
The current Solicitor General and soon-to-be Supreme Court Justice tried her best to woo Obama to a life in academia when the two worked at the University of Chicago, according to MSNBC's First Read.
Kagan joined the staff there in 1991 and won tenure in 1995. Obama was a part-time lecturer there between 1992 and 2004, when he was elected to the U.S. Senate, but according to reports she tried to convince him to pursue a tenure track.
Obama and Kagan share a deep Chicago connection. They both learned the ropes on the South Side, and rumor is they're both rabid White Sox fans, according to the Sun-Times.
Kagan clerked for legendary Chicago federal Appellate Judge Abner Mikva, who is one of Obama’s political mentors. She went on to have a brilliant scholarly career.
Kagan laid the groundwork for many of her political beliefs while at the University of Chicago, and perhaps provided fodder for Republicans to interrogate her.
Before winning tenure at the University of Chicago she published Confirmation Messes, Old and New a review of a book about the judicial confirmation process.
Kagan lamented the lack of "seriousness and substance" in confirmation hearings for Stephen Breyer and Ruth Bader Ginsburg. "When the Senate ceases to engage nominees in meaningful discussion of legal issues, the confirmation process takes on an air of vacuity and farce," she wrote in the University of Chicago Law Review in 1995.
Her college thesis suggest a socialist's in sheep's clothing:
Kagan spent her senior year conducting research for her thesis on the history of the socialist movement, which was titled “To the Final Conflict: Socialism in New York City, 1900–1933.” Her thesis has been criticized by her opponents for revealing sympathies with the Socialist Party and became a source of controversy when she was a potential nominee for Associate Justice David Souter’s seat on the Supreme Court last spring — a position which instead went to Sonia Sotomayor ’76 — and when she was nominated for her current position of solicitor general in January 2009.Sounds a lot like our community organizer in chief. Eh?
“Americans are more likely to speak of a golden past than of a golden future, of capitalism’s glories than of socialism’s greatness,” she wrote in her thesis. “Conformity overrides dissent; the desire to conserve has overwhelmed the urge to alter. Such a state of affairs cries out for explanation.”
She called the story of the socialist movement’s demise “a sad but also a chastening one for those who, more than half a century after socialism’s decline, still wish to change America … In unity lies their only hope.”
