Elena Kagan: most recent female Supreme Court Justice
Image from New York Daily News
On August 7, 2010, Elena Kagan was sworn in as the 112th person, and fourth woman, to serve on the Supreme Court, continuing a generational transformation of the nation's highest bench.
Kagan was born and raised in New York City, the second of three children in a middle class Jewish family living on Manhattan's Upper West Side. Kagan's mother was an educator and her father a lawyer. Inspired by her father's work, Kagan took an interest in law at an early age.
After attending Princeton, Oxford, and Harvard Law School, she completed federal Court of Appeals and Supreme Court clerkships. She clerked for Justice Thurgood Marshall of the United States Supreme Court.
She began her career in the private sector as an associate at Williams & Connolly in Washington, D.C. Three years later she began teaching law at the University of Chicago Law School, leaving to serve as Associate White House Counsel, and later as policy adviser, under President Clinton. Clinton nominated her for the United States Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, but this nomination expired without action. Kagan then became a professor at Harvard Law School and was later named its first female dean. During her five years as dean, Kagan had a significant impact at Harvard, recruiting new faculty and instituting curriculum changes.
President Obama appointed her Solicitor General on January 26, 2009 and on May 10, 2010 she was nominated to the Supreme Court.
Further details on her career can be found at the U.S. Supreme Court website.