Elena Kagan (2010-Present)

By: Purti Pareek Period 6

Biography

Kagan was born on April 28th, 1960 on the upper west side and attended Hunter College High School. After graduating from Hunter, she studied history at Princeton University. Her father was an attorney and that influenced her decision to go to Oxford, Harvard, and Princeton Law School. She was known to have strong opinions and a strong character.

Resume

She graduated AB summa cum laude in History from Princeton University. After that, she received the Sachs Scholarship which allowed her to go abroad to Oxford and receive a Master of Philosophy in 1983. Later on, she went on to Harvard Law School and received a Juris Doctor magna cum laude in 1986. Kagan was a law clerk for Judge Abner J. Mikva of the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit in 1987 and for Justice Thurgood Marshall of the U.S. Supreme Court in 1988. Marshall nicknamed the 5 foot 3 inch Kagan "Shorty".[7] She later entered private practice as an associate at the Washington, D.C., law firm of Williams & Connolly. Kagan joined the faculty of the University of Chicago Law School as an assistant professor in 1991 and became a tenured professor of law in 1995.While at the University of Chicago, she published a law review article on the regulation of First Amendment hate speech in the wake of the Supreme Court's ruling in R.A.V. v. City of St. Paul; an article discussing the significance of governmental motive in regulating speech; and a review of a book by Stephen L. Carter discussing the judicial confirmation process. According to her colleagues, Kagan's students complimented and admired her from the beginning, and she was granted tenure "despite the reservations of some colleagues who thought she had not published enough."

Presidential Appointment

Kagan was appointed by President Obama in 2010. Prior to her appointment, there was a lot of gossip in the media about her being appointed if there was a democratic president to be elected. The deans of over one-third of the country's law schools, sixty-nine people in total, endorsed Kagan's nomination in an open letter in early June. It lauded what it considered her coalition-building skills and "understanding of both doctrine and policy" as well as her written record of legal analysis. The confirmation hearings began June 28. Kagan's testimony and her answers to the Senate Judiciary Committee's questions on July 20 were uneventful, containing no new revelations about her character or background. Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania cited an article Kagan had published in the Chicago Law Review in 1995, criticizing the evasiveness of Supreme Court nominees in their hearings. Kagan, noted Specter, was now practicing that very evasiveness.On July 20, 2010, the Senate Judiciary Committee voted 136 to recommend Kagan's confirmation to the full Senate. On August 5 the full Senate confirmed her nomination by a vote of 6337. The voting was largely on party lines, with five Republicans (Richard Lugar, Judd Gregg, Lindsey Graham, Susan Collins, and Olympia Snowe) supporting her and one Democrat (Ben Nelson) opposing. The Senate's two independents voted in favor of confirmation. She was sworn in by Chief Justice John Roberts on Saturday August 7, in a private ceremony. Kagan is the first justice appointed without any prior experience as a judge since William Rehnquist in 1972. She is the fourth female justice in the Court's history (and, for the first time, part of a Court with three female justices) and the eighth Jewish justice,making three of the nine current justices Jewish.

Political Views

From her formative years, Ms. Kagan has embraced strongly liberal views. She has been quoted as saying, Where I grew up -- on Manhattans Upper West Side -- nobody ever admitted to voting for Republicans. She said that in her youth in Manhattan, the politicians were real Democrats -- not the closet Republicans that one sees so often these days but men and women committed to liberal principles and motivated by the ideal of an affirmative and compassionate government. In 1980, writing for her college newspaper, she rued the election of Ronald Reagan and Republican Senators, calling them Moral Majority-backed avengers of innocent life and the B-1 bomber. She hoped that the next few years will be marked by American disillusionment with conservative programs and solutions, and that a new, revitalized, perhaps more leftist left will once again come to the fore. Ms. Kagan dedicated much of her career to working for liberal Democrats in partisan staff positions. She worked as a staff member for the Michael Dukakis presidential campaign in 1988, as Special Counsel to Senate Judiciary Committee Democrats, and as a domestic policy aide to President Clinton. According to her, most of the time I spent in the White House, I did not serve as an attorney; I was instead a policy adviser. It is no surprise, then, that leading Democrats have stated that they know her beliefs to fall on the left hand side of the spectrum. Vice President Bidens chief of staff, Ron Klain, stated, Elena is clearly a legal progressive I think Elena is someone who comes from the progressive side of the spectrum. Former White House Counsel Greg Craig, when pushed for information on Ms. Kagans legal views, said simply, She is largely a progressive in the mold of Obama himself.