Background and career
Elena Kagan ( KAY-gən; born April 28, 1960) is an American lawyer who serves as an associate justice of the Supreme Court of the United States. She was appointed in 2010 by President Barack Obama and is the fourth woman to serve on the Court. Kagan was born and raised in New York City. After graduating from Princeton University, Worcester College, Oxford, and Harvard Law School, she clerked for a federal Court of Appeals judge and for Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall. She began her career as a professor at the University of Chicago Law School, leaving to serve as Associate White House Counsel, and later as a policy adviser under President Bill Clinton. After a nomination to the United States Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, which expired without action, she became a professor at Harvard Law School and was later named its first female dean. In 2009, Kagan became the first female solicitor general of the United States. The following year, President Obama nominated her to the Supreme Court to fill the vacancy arising from the impending retirement of Justice John Paul Stevens. The United States Senate confirmed her nomination by a vote of 63–37. As of 2022, she is the most recent justice appointed without any prior judicial experience. She favored a consensus-building approach until the conservative supermajority's decision to overturn Roe v. Wade. She has written the majority opinion in some landmark cases, such as Cooper v. Harris, Chiafalo v. Washington, and Kisor v. Wilkie, as well as several notable dissenting opinions, such as in Rucho v. Common Cause, West Virginia v. EPA, Brnovich v. DNC, Janus v. AFSCME, and Seila Law v. CFPB.
Kagan was born on April 28, 1960, in Manhattan, the second of three children of Robert Kagan, an attorney who represented tenants trying to remain in their homes, and Gloria (Gittelman) Kagan, who taught at Hunter College Elementary School. Both her parents were the children of Russian Jewish immigrants. One of her grandfathers, Irving Louis Kagan, was born in Białystok and moved to Brooklyn in 1907. A grandmother of Kagan's, Esther Bokelman, moved with her family as a child from Russia to Philadelphia. Kagan was raised in New York City. She has two brothers, Marc and Irving, both of whom became high school teachers. Marc taught New York City mayor Zohran Mamdani at the Bronx High School of Science, and was a member of his transition team. Kagan and her family lived in a third-floor apartment at West End Avenue and 75th Street, and attended Lincoln Square Synagogue. She was independent and strong-willed in her youth and, according to a former law partner of her father's, clashed with her Orthodox rabbi, Shlomo Riskin, over aspects of her bat mitzvah. "She had strong opinions about what a bat mitzvah should be like, which didn't parallel the wishes of the rabbi," her father's colleague said. Kagan and Riskin negotiated a solution. Riskin had never performed a ritual bat mitzvah before. She "felt very strongly that there should be ritual bat mitzvah in the synagogue, no less important than the ritual bar mitzvah. This was really the first formal bat mitzvah we had", he said. Kagan asked to read from the Torah on a Saturday morning as the boys did, but ultimately read from the Book of Ruth on a Friday night. She now practices Conservative Judaism. Kagan's childhood friend Margaret Raymond recalled that she was a teenage smoker but not a partier. On Saturday nights, Raymond and Kagan were "more apt to sit on the steps of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and talk." Kagan also loved literature and reread Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice every year. In her 1977 Hunter College High School yearbook, she is pictured in a judge's robe and holding a gavel. Next to the photo is a quotation from former Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter: "Government is itself an art, one of the subtlest of arts."
Kagan attended Hunter College High School, where her mother taught. The school had a reputation as one of the most elite learning institutions for high school girls and attracted students from all over New York City. Kagan emerged as one of the school's more outstanding students. She was elected president of the student government and served on a student-faculty consultative committee. Kagan then attended Princeton University, graduating in 1981 with a Bachelor of Arts, summa cum laude, in history. She was particularly drawn to American history and archival research. She wrote a senior thesis under historian Sean Wilentz titled "To the Final Conflict: Socialism in New York City, 1900–1933". In it she wrote, "Through its own internal feuding, then, the SP [Socialist Party] exhausted itself forever. The story is a sad but also a chastening one for those who, more than half a century after socialism's decline, still wish to change America." Wilentz says Kagan did not mean to defend socialism, noting that she "was interested in it. To study something is not to endorse it." As an undergraduate, Kagan also served as editorial chair of The Daily Princetonian. Along with eight other students, she penned a "Declaration of the Campaign for a Democratic University". It called for "a fundamental restructuring of university governance" and condemned Princeton's administration for making decisions "behind closed doors". Despite the liberal tone of The Daily Princetonian's editorials, Kagan was politically restrained in her dealings with fellow reporters. Her Daily Princetonian colleague Steven Bernstein has said he "cannot recall a time in which Kagan expressed her political views". He described Kagan's political stances as "sort of liberal, democratic, progressive tradition, and everything with lower case". In 1980, Kagan received Princeton's Daniel M. Sachs Class of 1960 Graduating Scholarship, one of the highest general awards the university confers. This enabled her to study at Worcester College, Oxford. As part of her graduation requirement, Kagan wrote a thesis called "The Development and Erosion of the American Exclusionary Rule: A Study in Judicial Method". It presented a critical look at the exclusionary rule and its evolution on the Supreme Court—the Warren Court, in particular. She earned a Master of Philosophy in politics at Oxford in 1983.
In 1983, at age 23, Kagan entered Harvard Law School. Her adjustment to Harvard's atmosphere was challenging—she received the worst grades of her entire law school career in her first semester. Kagan went on to earn an A in 17 of the 21 courses she took at Harvard, and she became a supervisory editor of the Harvard Law Review. She worked as a summer associate at the Wall Street law firm Fried, Frank, Harris, Shriver & Jacobson, where she worked in the litigation department. She graduated in 1986 with a Juris Doctor, magna cum laude. Her friend Jeffrey Toobin recalled that Kagan "stood out from the start as one with a formidable mind. She's good with people. At the time, the law school was a politically charged and divided place. She navigated the factions with ease, and won the respect of everyone."
After law school, Kagan was a law clerk for judge Abner J. Mikva of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit from 1986 to 1987. She became one of Mikva's favorite clerks; he called her "the pick of the litter". From 1987 to 1988, Kagan clerked for Justice Thurgood Marshall of the U.S. Supreme Court. Marshall said he hired Kagan to help him put the "spark" back into his opinions as the Court had been undergoing a conservative shift since William Rehnquist became Chief Justice in 1986. Marshall nicknamed the 5-foot-3-inch (1.60-metre) Kagan "Shorty". From 1989 to 1991, Kagan was in private practice at the Washington, D.C., law firm Williams & Connolly. As a junior associate, she drafted briefs and conducted discovery. During her short time at the firm, she handled five lawsuits that involved First Amendment or media law issues and libel issues. In 1991, Kagan became an assistant professor at the University of Chicago Law School. While there she first met Barack Obama, a guest lecturer at the school. While on the faculty there, Kagan published a law review article on the regulation of First Amendment hate speech in the wake of the Supreme Court's ruling in R.A.V. v. City of St. Paul; an article discussing the significance of governmental motive in regulating speech; and a review of a book by Stephen L. Carter discussing the judicial confirmation process. In the first article, which became highly influential, Kagan argued that the Supreme Court should examine governmental motives when deciding First Amendment cases and analyzed historic draft-card burning and flag burning cases in light of free speech arguments. In 1993, Senator Joe Biden appointed Kagan as a special counsel for the Senate Judiciary Committee. During this time, she worked on Ruth Bader Ginsburg's Supreme Court confirmation hearings. Kagan became a tenured professor of law in 1995. According to her colleagues, Kagan's students complimented and admired her from the beginning, and she was granted tenure "despite the reservations of some colleagues who thought she had not published enough".
Kagan served as Associate White House Counsel for Bill Clinton from 1995 to 1996, when Mikva served as White House Counsel. She worked on such issues affecting the Clinton administration as the Whitewater controversy, the White House travel office controversy, and Clinton v. Jones. From 1997 to 1999, she worked as Deputy Assistant to the President for Domestic Policy and deputy director of the Domestic Policy Council. Kagan worked on topics like budget appropriations, campaign finance reform, and social welfare issues. Her work is catalogued in the Clinton Library. Kagan coauthored a 1997 memo urging Clinton to support a ban on late-term abortions: "We recommend that you endorse the Daschle amendment in order to sustain your credibility on HR 1122 and prevent Congress from overriding your veto." On June 17, 1999, Clinton nominated Kagan to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, to replace James L. Buckley, who took senior status in 1996. The Senate Judiciary Committee's Republican Chairman, Orrin Hatch, scheduled no hearing, effectively ending her nomination. When the Senate term ended, her nomination lapsed, as did that of fellow Clinton nominee Allen Snyder.
