Blogging for the Times, legal reporter (and Harvard overseer) Linda Greenhouse writes about Douglas Souter’s speech at Harvard commencement.

…it was with a mixture of relief and something close to joy that I listened last week to David Souter’s commencement address at Harvard, his undergraduate and law school alma mater, which awarded him an honorary degree.

…for those who care about the Supreme Court, Justice Souter served up some rich fare: his own vision of the craft of constitutional interpretation and a defense of the need for judges to go beyond the plain text — what he called the “fair-reading model” — and make choices among the competing values embedded in the Constitution. Doing this was neither judicial activism nor “making up the law,” he said; rather, it was the unavoidable “stuff of judging,” and to suppose otherwise was to “egregiously” miss the point of what constitutional law is about.

Meanwhile, the Washington Post reports on how Harvard’s next Supreme Court justice, Elena Kagan, was shaped by her Clinton-era battles with tobacco companies.

In Kagan’s trajectory to become President Obama‘s Supreme Court nominee, the tobacco battle of the 1990s proved formative for someone who had little exposure to the messy realities of policymaking. In forging a deal that could satisfy Congress, public health advocates, states and tobacco companies, Kagan was for the first time in a high-profile role where she would hone the characteristics she has become known for: finding compromise in pursuit of a daunting goal and using her command of complex issues to win over powerful people with outsize egos.

The coverage of Kagan has shifted from whether she’ll be confirmed to what kind of judge she’ll be…..