Judge Brett Kavanaugh is a nice guy. That understates the point. As his former clerks (many of whom are registered Democrats) write in a letter to the Senate Judiciary Committee, “He is unfailingly warm and gracious with his colleagues no matter how strongly they disagree about a case, and he is well-liked and respected by judges and lawyers across the ideological spectrum as a result.” I clerked for a different D.C. Circuit judge, but I experienced Judge Kavanaugh’s grace and generosity in small ways too. He made an effort to learn the names of all the clerks for other judges in the courthouse — and to learn something about them as well. (We talked about the race that I was training for then.) He listened to our views on cases. Even after I clerked, he e-mailed me out of the blue with thoughtful comments on a law review article that I co-authored, along with suggestions for future research.

Kavanaugh’s grace and generosity are not directed only at D.C. Circuit clerks and law professors. We’ll hear more in the coming weeks about the girls’ basketball teams that Kavanaugh coaches and the elementary school students whom he tutors. And I expect that we’ll hear from many more people whom Kavanaugh has helped in much more profound ways than, e.g., offering tips about how best to approach the Boston Marathon’s Heartbreak Hill.

But does it matter — for purposes of his confirmation — that Brett Kavanaugh is nice? An interesting discussion on Twitter between Washington University School of Law’s Dan Epps and my colleague Todd Henderson prompted me to think more deeply about the question. My view is “yes”: It matters — and not just at the margins. It’s not the only thing that matters. For example, if I were a senator in 1930, I would not have voted to confirm the notoriously racist Hoover nominee John J. Parker — regardless of what he was like in personal interactions. And if I were a senator in 1939, I probably would have voted to confirm Felix Frankfurter even though he was, by many accounts, not nice.

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