By ADAM LIPTAK
c.2010 New York Times News Service
WASHINGTON – In her early years as a law professor, Elena Kagan wrote almost exclusively on the First Amendment. There are indications in those writings that her views on government regulation of speech were closer to the Supreme Court’s more conservative justices, like Antonin Scalia, than to Justice John Paul Stevens, whom she hopes to replace.
Stevens is not a First Amendment absolutist. He wrote the majority opinion in 1978 in Federal Communications Commission v. Pacifica Foundation which said the government could ban the broadcast of George Carlin’s “seven dirty words” monologue. And he dissented in Texas v. Johnson, a 1989 decision striking down a state law that made it a crime to burn the flag, while Scalia was in the majority.
There is good reason to think Kagan disagreed with Stevens in both cases.