Divining "balls and strikes" from a book review?

from USAToday:

[Kagan's] words stand in contrast to the more technical view of judging voiced by Chief Justice John Roberts at his confirmation hearing five years ago. Roberts said he considered himself an umpire merely calling balls and strikes.

Kagan apparently has never directly addressed Roberts' comments. Republicans have held his description of the job as a model of judicial restraint and used it to criticize President Barack Obama for what they call his support of judicial activism — judges imposing their own views on the law.

But Kagan put forward a different idea of judging in a 1995 law review article.

"It should be no surprise by now that many of the votes a Supreme Court justice casts have little to do with technical legal ability and much to do with conceptions of value," Kagan said in a review of Yale law professor Stephen Carter's book The Confirmation Mess.

Kagan quoted Carter approvingly to say that to decide the hard cases that rise to the level of Supreme Court review, justices must use their judgment. When they do that, Kagan said (again citing Carter), their "own experience and values become the most important data."

It may be hard to divine just what Kagan meant, but it's "not calling balls and strikes," says Georgetown University law professor Pamela Harris.


Previously on IPBiz:

****Of Kagan, in spite of the academic credentials as to school, there is some issue about the number of articles; from the Daily Beast -->

Yesterday, I read everything Elena Kagan has ever published. It didn't take long: In the nearly 20 years since Kagan became a law professor, she's published very little academic scholarship—three law review articles, along with a couple of shorter essays and two brief book reviews. Somehow, Kagan got tenure at Chicago in 1995 on the basis of a single article in The Supreme Court Review—a scholarly journal edited by Chicago's own faculty—and a short essay in the school's law review. She then worked in the Clinton administration for several years before joining Harvard as a visiting professor of law in 1999. While there she published two articles, but since receiving tenure from Harvard in 2001 (and becoming dean of the law school in 2003) she has published nothing.

***UPDATE

In the context of the trial of Rod Blagojevich, one finds the following text:

"The first thing they do is portray Blagojevich as the buffoon that he is," says DePaul University law professor Leonard Cavise, who has been on hand for much of the testimony. "They say, look, he has a bad mouth, he has a loose mouth. He spent a lot of time thinking about things other than the state of Illinois. But he's not a crook."

The idea of a law professor talking about somebody else being portrayed as a buffoon is intriguing. And the allusion to crook evokes "I am not a crook." And, no, Gary Boone did not invent the integrated circuit, even if a Stanford law professor said so in the Stanford Law Review.