When he isn't busy complaining about the number of Jewish people serving as Justices on the Supreme Court, Pat Buchanan can also be found arguing about Elena Kagan's scholarship:

Kagan never served as a judge, never litigated a case before being named solicitor general, never wrote a book or anything else anyone has turned up that manifests real legal scholarship.

Buchanan's accusation doesn't hold up to much scrutiny. Libertarian law professor Eugene Volokh notes on his blog that Kagan “wrote or cowrote four major articles” and three other shorter “but substantial” pieces which he described as “quite good output for eight years as a working scholar.”

Volokh goes on to say:

Moreover, two of her articles have been judged to be quite important by her colleagues. Presidential Administration has been cited 305 times in law journal articles (according to a search of Westlaw's JLR database) -- an extraordinarily high number of citations for any article, especially one that is less than 10 years old. In fact, a HeinOnline list of all articles with more than 100 citations, run in August 2009, reports that her article was at the time the 6th most-cited law review article of all the articles published since 2000. Many legal scholars, even ones working in the relatively high-citation fields of constitutional law and administrative law, have never and will never write an article that is so much cited.

Chevron's Nondelegation Doctrine has been cited 75 times, a very high number for an article's first 10 years; I suspect that only a tiny fraction of one percent of all law review articles are cited at such a pace.Private Speech, Public Purpose has been cited 129 times, likewise a very high number. The Changing Faces of First Amendment Neutrality has been cited only 36 times, but that probably stems in large part from the fact that Supreme Court Review articles from that era are not on Westlaw or Lexis (ridiculous, especially for a faculty-edited journal with the Supreme Court Review's excellent reputation, and likely stemming from a short-sighted non-licensing decision by the University of Chicago Press).

And while some articles might be heavily cited because they fit with academic ideological fashions, I don't think these would qualify. As I understand it, Kagan's administrative law work is consistent with a strong executive model, and the modern intellectual fashion (especially during the Bush era) has been to criticize this model (though the balance of the legal academy on this has not been as lopsided as on some other issues). Likewise, Kagan's First Amendment scholarship, especially Private Speech, Public Purpose, doesn't fit with any current fashion among First Amendment scholars; it is not, for instance, distinctively left-wing in its views (the direction in which the constitutional law academy famously trends these days). That it has been heavily cited suggests a substantive judgment about its technical merit and originality, and not just ideological sympathy.

So, Kagan had a substantial level of output for someone in her position, and that output has been cited by others at an astounding rate. That would seem to be the exact opposite of the charge Buchanan made in his column.

This is the same Pat Buchanan who advised President Nixon to appoint Italian and Irish Americans to the federal judiciary in order to win votes from those ethnic groups. He may not be the best person to go to for advice on what the substantive case is for or against a judicial nominee.