With Solicitor General Elena Kagan’s Supreme Court confirmation hearing due to start June 28, left-leaning skeptics worry that she may be more deferential to presidential war powers–at the expense of civil liberties–than retiring Justice John Paul Stevens.

It’s true that in the future, the justices are likely to take the president’s side more often than in the George W. Bush years. But if that’s the case, the main reason won’t be the expected confirmation of Kagan. The real reason may be simpler: that the court has less cause to intervene in national-security matters now that the Bush-Cheney administration’s extravagant claims of presidential power are history.

This is not to dismiss the speculation–by leftist critics, but also by some supporters of Kagan, including Harvard Law colleague Charles Fried–that she may be more inclined to support presidential war powers than Stevens. It was Stevens, after all, who led the liberal justices’ charge against Bush’s denial of due process to detained terrorism suspects. In doing so, Stevens and his liberal colleagues stretched judicial power over the military further than ever before.

View a gallery of recently-released documents marking Elena Kagan’s legal career, Jason Reed / Reuters-Corbis

While Kagan has said very little about such issues, her work representing the government in national-security cases has doubtless given her an appreciation of the challenges facing any wartime president. And records from her four years in the Clinton White House suggest that she may be less liberal overall than Stevens.

In a far-from-conclusive effort to pinpoint Elena Kagan’s place on the ideological spectrum, the media have parsed her Princeton senior thesis, Oxford master’s thesis, law-clerk memos to Justice Thurgood Marshall, subsequent disagreements with him, Clinton White House memos, academic writings, speeches, legal briefs, and more.

But an intriguing clue that is riling up conservative blogs–so far unmentioned in the mainstream media–should somewhat allay liberal fears that Kagan will be a tepid moderate reluctant to advance liberal causes through expansive use of judicial power. The clue is Kagan’s glowing praise in 2006 for Aharon Barak, a world-renowned, retired Israeli Supreme Court justice whose creativity in advancing liberal causes by overturning elected officials’ policies makes Marshall look almost like a champion of judicial restraint. Speaking at a Harvard Law School award ceremony for Barak, then Dean Kagan praised the Israeli jurist as “my judicial hero” and “the judge who has best advanced democracy, human rights, the rule of law, and justice.”

One of America’s best and most nuanced legal minds, Judge Richard Posner, has pointed attention to Barak’s extraordinarily aggressive pattern of sweeping aside the actions of elected officials based on little more than his own policy preferences. In “Enlightened Despot,” an April 2007 New Republic reviewof Barak’s book The Judge in a Democracy, Posner wrote that Barak should be “considered Exhibit A for why American judges should be extremely wary about citing foreign judicial decisions.”

It’s a pretty safe bet that the Democratic-ruled Senate will confirm Solicitor General Elena Kagan, President Obama’s Supreme Court nominee, by about Aug. 6, with over 60 votes. But that’s not to deny that many conservatives–and some liberals–will raise passionate complaints that the 50-year-old Kagan is unfit to be a justice. Indeed, they’ve been attacking her for as long as she has been the consensus front-runner for the nomination.

Conservatives and others have pounded especially hard on her efforts to exclude military recruiters from Harvard Law School’s career services facilities as a protest against the exclusion of gays from the military.

Few if any critics doubt that Kagan is extraordinarily intelligent and accomplished, or that she demonstrated great skill as a consensus-builder as dean of Harvard Law School, where she calmed the troubled ideological waters and won the admiration of conservative and liberal colleagues alike, from 2003 through 2008. But critics do claim that Kagan–who spent most of her career as a law professor and Clinton White House official, with very little courtroom experience before becoming Solicitor General–has less experience relevant to being a justice than any nominee in decades. Indeed, unlike all nine current justices, she has no judicial experience at all.

The New York-born Kagan would increase the Court’s domination by establishmentarians who attended Harvard and Yale law schools–six and three justices, respectively–and its remoteness from the struggles of ordinary Americans. But what really animates most critics is hostility to a nominee whom they consider too liberal or too conservative.