"For the Souter seat, I can't think of anyone nearly as strong as Elena Kagan, whose combination of intellectual brilliance and political skill would make her a ten-strike... I've known and worked for her... since she was my student and research assistant in the 1980s, have watched her become a scholar of the first rank and a star... teacher, and have marveled at how skillfully she transformed a school that had long been considerably less than the sum of its parts into a vibrant and wonderful place for students to learn and for faculty to teach, write, and collaborate. Her techniques for mastering the substance of the many fields in which we have made important new faculty appointments during her tenure as dean and for gently but firmly persuading a bunch of prima donnas to see things her way in case after case—techniques she has deployed with a light touch and with an open enough mind to permit others to persuade her from time to time—are precisely the techniques I can readily envision her employing not just with Justices like Kennedy but even with a justice like Alito or, on... rare occasions, with a justice like Scalia or Roberts."