Elena Kagan

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.

Elena Kagan (born April 28, 1960) is an American lawyer who serves as an associate justice of the Supreme Court of the United States.

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.

Kagan was raised in New York City.

She has two brothers, Marc and Irving.

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.

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 is considered part of the Court's liberal wing, but tends to be its most moderate justice.

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.

She was nominated by President Barack Obama on May 10, 2010, and has served since August 7, 2010.

Kagan is the fourth woman to become a member of 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.