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A bit of the fog is beginning to lift on the work and thinking of Elena Kagan, President Obama's nominee to the Supreme Court. An initial perusal of thousands of pages of documents from her years in the Clinton White House show her to be an adept centrist -- much like her old boss -- who tried to remain thoughtful while shielding President Bill Clinton from ideological extremes. It is hard to find anything in the 90,000-odd pages of papers released so far that shows whether Ms. Kagan will be an effective restraint on the Roberts Court's aggressive march to the right. She was, after all, a mid- to senior-level bureaucrat in the 1990s, working for a White House that could twist itself into knots trying to find the midpoint on every issue. Her job often required her to become a contortionist, searching for principled positions that would not inflame a newly Republican Congress or a generally conservative Supreme Court. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

-- It was a hypothetical question in a Supreme Court argument, and it was posed almost 40 years ago. But it managed to anticipate and in some ways to answer President Obama's argument for withholding photographs showing the abuse of prisoners in Iraq and Afghanistan. What if, Justice Potter Stewart asked a lawyer for The New York Times in the Pentagon Papers case in 1971, a disclosure of sensitive information in wartime ''would result in the sentencing to death of 100 young men whose only offense had been that they were 19 years old and had low draft numbers?'' The Times's lawyer, Alexander M. Bickel, tried to duck the question, but the justice pressed him: [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]