[I]t's easy to forget how much difference the public face of the Supreme Court can make in advancing a humane and yet suitably cautious conception of… - Laurence Tribe

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[I]t's easy to forget how much difference the public face of the Supreme Court can make in advancing a humane and yet suitably cautious conception of the rule of law and the role of courts in the pursuit of justice. That's a facet of the Court's role to which few justices over our history have made much of a contribution, given the significant limits on what a sitting justice can suitably say in a public forum. Louis Brandeis, Earl Warren, and Robert Jackson might be cited as exceptions. David Souter certainly couldn't be credited with success in that role, although the conspicuous modesty of his personal style was a plus... Elena Kagan would, however, combine that personal modesty with an appealing public persona and would project a well-grounded image of justice as fairness and of law as codified common sense. In that regard... a Justice Kagan would be a much more formidable match for Justice Scalia than Justice Breyer has been—and certainly than a Justice Sotomayor or a Justice Wood could be—in the kinds of public settings in which it has been all too easy for Scalia to make his rigid and unrealistic formalism seem synonymous with the rule of law and to make Breyer's pragmatism seem mushy and unconstrained by comparison. It is important... for the simultaneously progressive and yet principled, pragmatic and yet constrained, approach to law and justice that you have espoused... since becoming president, to be embodied in the person and voice of your first Supreme Court nominee. Elena Kagan would personify that approach and would ultimately be seen by the American public to exemplify it.