More on the Roberts-Kagan exchange

Apropos of Heather Gerken's prior posting, which I think is spot on, I offer two further observations: The Roberts-Kagan exchange, though sharp, doesn't begin to compare in venom to that between Roberts and Breyer in Parents Iinvolved. At the very least, those pundits who initially viewed Roberts as likely to take the Court in a more civil direction might further reconsider their view. Secondly, Kagan's opinion is marvelously written, the first opinion almost literally in years that I've genuinely enjoyed reading, for reasons that are at least partially independent of my agreement with its argument. Most of it, I believe, is fully readable by someone without legal training. Which is not to to say, of course, that it suffers with regard to its more legalistic arguments. One should remember that as a professor she wrote one of the very best (and very long) articles on the core meaning of the First Amendment. I presume that it would have been regarded as tacky for her to have cited it, but there's no doubt that she has a deeper theoretical understanding of the First Amendment than any of the other justices, which, I suspect, helps to account for the impatience that Heather detects with regard to the majority's failure to acknowledge that in no way at all is the Arizona scheme content-discriminatory.