Justice Elena Kagan
Today’s Justice of the Day is: ELENA KAGAN. Justice Kagan was born on this day, April 28, in 1960.
Justice Kagan was born in Manhattan, New York City, New York. She received an A.B. from Princeton in 1981, then went on to earn an M.Phil. from Worcester College at the University of Oxford in 1983, before graduating with a J.D. in 1986 from Harvard Law School, located in Massachusetts, the state from which she would be appointed to the Supreme Court of the United States.
Justice Kagan served as a Law Clerk to two prominent members of the federal judiciary, Judge Abner Mikva of the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit (from 1986 to 1987) and Justice Thurgood Marshall (from 1987 to 1988). The year after completing her clerkships, she began a two years-long stint in private practice in the District of Columbia, before moving on to join the faculty of the University of Chicago Law School, where she worked as an assistant professor (from 1991 to 1994) and a Professor (from 1994 to 1997); during that time she was Special Counsel to the United States Senate Committee on the Judiciary (in 1993) and Associate Counsel to President William J. Clinton (from 1995 to 1996). Justice Kagan left the University of Chicago to become Deputy Assistant for Domestic Policy and Deputy Director of the Domestic Policy Council in the Executive Office of the President from 1997 to 1999, the year she joined the faculty of her law school alma mater. At Harvard, she would rise from visiting professor (from 1999 to 2001) to Professor (from 2001 to 2010) to Dean (from 2003 to 2009). Justice Kagan is thought to have left the White House in part because President Clinton’s June 17, 1999 nomination of her to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit failed after the Republican-controlled Senate refused to hold a vote on it. She became Solicitor General of the United States in 2009, the first woman to hold that position, and would remain there until her appointment to the SCUS.
Justice Kagan was nominated by President Barack Obama on May 10, 2010, to a seat vacated by Justice John Paul Stevens. She was confirmed by the U.S. Senate on August 5, 2010, and received her commission the following day. Justice Kagan took the Judicial Oath to officially join the SCUS on August 7, and has served her entire tenure on the Roberts Court. She is an actively serving Member of the SCUS, and is currently the most junior Justice serving on that bench.
Justice Kagan has emerged as one of the clearest and most effective writers on the Court today, with some, like well-known journalist Jeffrey Rosen, even saying that her talents in that regard may already rival that of the long-serving (famously skillful writer) Justice Antonin Scalia. In terms of ideology, Justice Kagan seems to be more in line with the relatively moderate Justice Stephen G. Breyer, in contrast with her fellow President Obama-appointee, Justice Sonia Sotomayor, who seems to be a bit closer to Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. In her brief tenure, she has emerged as the consensus builder that Democrats had hoped she would be, and is frequently entrusted by Justice Anthony M. Kennedy (the SCUS’s premier swing vote) with delivering the opinion of the Court in many closely-divided cases that feature him joining with the Court’s four Democratic-appointees.