Elena Kagan gave bogus science a blind endorsement

Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan’s testimony at a July Senate hearing raised troubling questions about accountability in judicial education.

Kagan acknowledged that she wrote the foreword to the Federal Judicial Center’s “Reference Manual on Scientific Evidence” without reading its climate-change chapter — a chapter later removed after critics identified serious bias concerns. She also admitted that she still had not read it.

Kagan’s admission offers a cautionary example. Rank does not excuse a failure of diligence.

Her foreword presents the manual as an objective resource for judges handling cases involving complex scientific evidence, from epidemiology to emerging technologies. Yet Kagan placed her authority behind a volume whose most contentious material she had not taken the time to examine.

That failure weakens the manual’s credibility and raises a broader question: