Obama reveals nominees for key Justice Department positions

President-elect Barack Obama has released the names of several nominees for key positions in the Department of Justice. The most prominent is Elena Kagan, current dean of Harvard Law School, to replace Paul Clement as Solicitor General. I don’t know much about Kagan as an actual courtroom advocate, but she certainly has all the credentials as a legal scholar.

Following Clement will be a hard act to follow. He had few peers as an advocate, rivaling John Roberts in the eyes of most observers on both the right and the left as one of the finest appellate attorneys ever to appear before the high court.

The key nomination I’ve been waiting to see is Dawn Johnsen, tapped by Obama to head the Office of Legal Counsel, the DOJ agency that advises the executive branch on what is and is not legal under the constitution. I was hoping that the nomination would go to Marty Lederman, a former OLC official now teaching at Georgetown who has been highly critical of that agency during the Bush administration.

But Johnsen strikes me as an excellent candidate. She teaches law at Indiana University and seems committed to overturning the legacy of unconstitutional actions by the Bush administration, as indicated by the title of a recent article she wrote in the Boston University Law Review, What’s a President to Do? Interpreting the Constitution in the Wake of the Bush Administration’s Abuses. She also has experience at the OLC, serving as acting assistant attorney general in charge of that department in 1987-1988.

Here is video of Johnson speaking at a meeting of the American Constitution Society discussing the importance of the president being restrained by the law and the need for the Office of Legal Counsel to act as a watchdog on executive actions rather than as a rubber stamp for what the president wants to do.