Elena Kagan

US Supreme Court justice since 2010

This article is about the U.S. Supreme Court justice. For the Russian writer with the same birth name, see Elena Rzhevskaya .

Elena Kagan (/ˈkeɪɡən/ 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 _.

Early life

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

…

Kagan in the Princeton University yearbook, 1981

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. …