The document dump required for nominees to the Supreme Court includes Elena Kagan’s Master’s Thesis, which is a criticism of the 1960’s-era Warren court’s manipulation of the law to advance its ideas of social justice:
The documents include the thesis Kagan wrote in 1983 during two years she spent at Oxford University between graduating from Princeton and enrolling at Harvard Law School. Her subject was the Supreme Court’s treatment of the exclusionary rule under the Fourth Amendment, a rule that requires courts to forbid the use of evidence seized through unconstitutional means. In criticizing the Warren court of the 1950s and 1960s, she wrote that the justices who expanded the application of the rule during that time “unwittingly did almost everything in their power to assure the rule's eventual demise” because of “their total concentration upon end results.”
In her thesis, Kagan wrote: “U.S. Supreme Court Justices live in the knowledge that they have the authority either to command or to block great social, political and economic change. At times, the temptation to wield this power becomes irresistible. The justices, at such times, will attempt to steer the law in order to achieve certain ends and advance certain values. In following this path, the justices are likely to forget both that they are judges and that their Court is a court.”
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