Elena Kagan

Elena Kagan

Elena Kagan is an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States. She was nominated by President Obama on May 10, 2010 and has served since August 7, 2010. She is considered part of the Court’s liberal wing but tends to be more moderate.

About Elena Kagan in brief

Summary Elena KaganElena Kagan is an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States. She was nominated by President Barack Obama on May 10, 2010 and has served since August 7, 2010. She is considered part of the Court’s liberal wing but tends to be one of the more moderate justices of that group. Kagan was born and raised in New York City. She attended Princeton University, the University of 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 University of Chicago Law School, leaving to serve as Associate White House Counsel, and later as policy adviser under President Bill Clinton. She wrote the majority opinion in Cooper v. Harris, a landmark case restricting the permissible uses of race in drawing congressional districts. In 2009, Kagan became the first female Solicitor General of the U.S. and served as editorial chair of The Daily Princetonian, a liberal-leaning newspaper. She also served as chair of the Board of Trustees of The New York Review of Books, a conservative-leaning magazine. She has a son, Michael Kagan, and a daughter, Emma Kagan. She lives in Washington, D.C., with her husband, Michael S. Sotomayor, and their son, Alex Sotomaye. She and her husband have a son and daughter-in-law, both of whom live in New Jersey. They have two sons, Marc Kagan and Irving Kagan; their son is a junior at Harvard University; their daughter is a senior at Columbia University.

The couple has three grandchildren and one great-great-grandchild, who is expected to be born in December. She had a bat mitzvah at the age of 18. She now practices Conservative Judaism. She once wrote a thesis titled “To the Final Conflict in Socialism in 1900–1933” on the decline of socialism in America. In it, she wrote: “Through own internal feuding, the SPJ exhausted itself forever” She has two brothers, Marc and Irving; she also has a step-son, Marc Sotomays, who works as a lawyer in Washington. Her husband is a former White House counsel; she has two children, Michael and Emma Sotomayed, who work for the Department of Justice. Her son, Alexander, is a federal judge; he serves on the Federal District Court for the Eastern District of New York and the District of Columbia. Her daughter, Alexandra, works as an attorney in Washington; she is married to former President George W. Bush. She previously served as editor of the New YorkReview of Books and the editor of The Wall Street Journal. Her mother taught at Hunter College High School; she was elected president of the student government and served on a student-faculty consultative committee. In her 1977 Hunter College high school yearbook, she is pictured in a judge’s robe and holding a gavel. Her father’s colleague said she was independent and strong-willed.