Scalia, the pugnacious standard bearer of conservative jurisprudence, has a knack for articulating conservative principles with witticisms and idioms that ruthlessly dress down his opponents’ dry legal prose.

In United States v. Virginia, a case that struck down the Virginia Military Academy’s male-only admissions policy, Scalia dissented in classic style, excoriating the seven-judge majority in the case.

“It is one of the unhappy incidents of the federal system that a self-righteous Supreme Court, acting on its Members' personal view of what would make a 'more perfect Union' (a criterion only slightly more restrictive than a 'more perfect world') can impose its own favored social and economic dispositions nationwide,” Scalia wrote.

It is writing like this that has made Scalia the eminently relatable—and quotable—justice who has done much in advancing a conservative agenda. So many liberals hope that Kagan will be able to serve a similar role for the left in making the case to the public for liberal jurisprudence.

Both Goldstein and Law School Professor Mark V. Tushnet ’67 say that parallels with conservative justices are difficult to make but argue that that Kagan may be more of a ‘Roberts of the Left’ than a ‘Scalia.’

And according to Law School Professor Richard H. Fallon, that may not be a bad thing.

“Some people think that Scalia has been so muscular, he has failed to achieved the influence with his colleagues that he might have achieved had he been less muscular,” Fallon says. “He has not been successful as a coalition builder.”

Roberts, meanwhile, has proven an expert coalition builder on the court, finding himself voting with the majority in 91 percent of cases in the 2010-2011 term. With the current makeup of the court, liberal and conservative justices are evenly divided with four members in either wing. Justice Anthony Kennedy is the key swing vote, and during the past term he has been the deciding vote in a number of controversial cases.

With Kennedy in the middle, observers of the court figure that the success of either ideological wing depend in large part on which side is able to recruit Kennedy to vote with them. And during the past year, the liberal wing of the court has had difficulty gaining Kennedy’s vote. Kagan has voted with him in only 71 percent of cases.

During the past term, Kagan has found herself voting most often with the liberal wing of the court, siding most often with Justice Sonia Sotomayor with whom she voted in 94 percent of cases. Kagan sided with Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg in 90 percent of cases and with Justice Stephen Breyer in 88 percent of cases.

But Law School Professor Richard Parker says things may change once Kagan settles in on the court.

“I think that she needs and wants to be known as an individual on the court,” Parker says. “If you’re the new justice, you want to play the game as it’s being played, and her natural affinity at the beginning would be with the left. If in five years she’s bloc voting with them, I would be shocked.”

ON WRITING WELL

Feeding the hope of some on the left, Kagan’s first year on the court has proved that she can write in an engaging, witty prose—a style that can go toe-to-toe with Scalia’s muscular conservatism.

Her colloquial writing style—using poignant metaphors, theoretical examples, and diction like “topsy-turvy” and “chutzpah”—make her opinions sharp and easy to understand. A recent article in The New Republic described two of her dissents as sounding more like New York Times op-eds than traditional legal writing.