by David Gura

Last Thursday, the United States Senate Committee on the Judiciary released a .PDF copy of the bipartisan questionnaire Elena Kagan, President Obama's most-recent nominee to the Supreme Court, is expected to complete. Her responses will be available online soon.

Although the questionnaire is pretty exhaustive — "supply four (4) copies of all community-wide letters, emails, or other communications you sent to the Harvard Law School or the Harvard undergraduate community, including the student body or faculty in your capacity as Dean of the Harvard Law School, including those related to Harvard's antidiscrimination policy and/or its implementation," for example — the committee did not request copies of Kagan's undergraduate and graduate school theses. Nonetheless, the White House will make the two essays available to the public, Politico reports today.

At Oxford University, where Kagan read for a master's degree, she wrote an essay on the exclusionary rule. Before that, as an undergraduate at Princeton University, Kagan produced a 156-page senior thesis, called "To the Final Conflict: Socialism in New York City, 1900-1933," under the tutelage of eminent American historian Sean Wilentz. According to Politico, RedState.com, a conservative website, a word in that title raised — ahem — a red flag.

Last week, the site posted a copy of the essay in-full online. On Friday, Daniel Linke, a Princeton archivist, requested it be removed. RedState.com complied.

If you want to read an official copy of Kagan's thesis, Princeton has posted instructions on its website.

Due to copyright considerations, the entire thesis cannot be provided online. However, a copy may be obtained by ordering it through the Princeton University Archives at the Mudd Manuscript Library.

If, as Politico reports, the White House releases the thesis gratis, in the interests of transparency, it'll save interested readers a lot of money. The cost of an official version, from Princeton? $54.60, payable by Visa or MasterCard only.