Kagan on Military Recruitment

Elena Kagan has been getting a lot of flak  from the right for her position on military recruitment at Harvard. While the military’s don’t ask don’t tell policy is unjust, Harvard’s position on recruitment was also misplaced—and, were the question ever presented to my faculty, I’d vote against barring the military from recruiting at my law school for the same reasons as Ilya Somin.

But, although Harvard made the wrong call on recruitment (albeit one that, in fairness, is not attributable just to Kagan, but, reportedly, to an overwhelming majority of the Harvard law faculty), Kagan’s opposition to the Solomon Amendment, which conditioned federal funding on JAG recruiters’ access to campus, has much to recommend it from a libertarian standpoint, for the reasons put forward in Cato’s amicus brief  in Rumsfeld v. FAIR, the case challenging the Solomon Amendment (which you can download here). (Disclosure: I co-wrote the brief when I was at Cato. As I recall, this was a controversial position within Cato, and I’d guess that remains true today. Cato’s current legal shop might well take a different view were the question presented to it now.)

True, the Supreme Court rejected our position 8-0. But it’s not the first time, and will be not be the last, that the Court musters eight votes for what some libertarians think is a questionable outcome.

And for the record, my view on Kagan—while she’s, as Kagan would say, “not my people,” she’s a top-notch scholar, a great Dean (who was very fair to faculty conservatives and libertarians), by all accounts an outstanding teacher, and likely to fall somewhere on the liberal continuum to the left of Breyer and to the right of Stevens.  Could be worse!