By Marcia Coyle, From The National Law Journal

Justice Elena Kagan recently revealed some “killer instincts” in a conversation at Harvard Law School that touched on the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2011 decision about violent video games.

In preparation for Brown v. Entertainment Merchants Association, Kagan said, “Justice [Stephen] Breyer and I actually played the violent video games most involved in this case.”

Breyer’s clerks set up the game apparatus in his chambers. “There we were, killing everybody left and right,” Kagan told Harvard Law Dean Martha Minow in a conversation posted Thursday.

Breyer, she recalled, thought the game was “really horrible, disgusting, repellant. And I was like, ‘Next round! Next round!'”

Given Breyer’s reaction, Kagan said, it’s probably not surprising he ended up on the opposite side of Kagan in the decision.

Kagan joined a 7-2 majority that struck down on First Amendment grounds California’s ban on the sale and rental of violent video games to minors. Breyer wrote a dissent that focused on a double standard in First Amendment jurisprudence.

“What sense does it make to forbid selling to a 13-year-old boy a magazine with an image of a nude woman, while protecting a sale to that 13­ year-old of an interactive video game in which he actively, but virtually, binds and gags the woman, then tortures and kills her?” Breyer wrote. Justice Clarence Thomas also wrote a dissent.

Kagan said the case was “really hard, a super hard case.”

The justice also responded to a question about the dominance of the docket and arguments by cases from a select group of Supreme Court lawyers and whether that has a detrimental effect on others’ access to the high court.

In addition to how those lawyers’ skills and experience aid the justices in their own work, Kagan said, many of those lawyers do a significant amount of pro bono work, “many are happy to take cases for free” because of the benefits to their own practices, and many work with law school clinics which are doing excellent work.

“It shouldn’t be the case that people are deprived of excellent representation,” she said. “It enables more people to have excellent representation.”

IMAGE: Associate Justice Elena Kagan, left, discusses her career and the Supreme Court during a talk with Harvard Law School Dean Martha Minow, right, on September 8.   Credit: Harvard Law School via Youtube

For more on this story go to: http://www.nationallawjournal.com/id=1202737594528/Kagan-Reveals-Killer-Instinct-In-Violent-Video-Game-Case#ixzz3mNxn8ZF9

See also iNews Cayman Editorial published September 21 2015 “Violent games torturing and killing women allowed – image of nude women not” at: http://www.ieyenews.com/wordpress/the-editor-speaks-violent-games-torturing-and-killing-women-allowed-image-of-nude-women-not/