Elena Kagan Biography Quotes 15 Report mistakes

Early Life and Education
Elena Kagan was born on April 28, 1960, in New York City and grew up on Manhattan's Upper West Side in a close-knit, civically engaged Jewish family. Her father, Robert Kagan, practiced law, and her mother, Gloria Kagan, taught in New York's public schools. She attended Hunter College High School, a selective public school where she distinguished herself as a strong student and editor, before heading to Princeton University. At Princeton she majored in history, graduated summa cum laude in 1981, and wrote a prize-winning senior thesis on the history of socialism in New York City under the guidance of historian Sean Wilentz. Awarded the Daniel M. Sachs Class of 1960 Scholarship, she pursued graduate study at Worcester College, Oxford, earning an M.Phil. in 1983. Kagan then attended Harvard Law School, where she served as supervising editor of the Harvard Law Review and received her J.D. in 1986.

Clerkships and Early Legal Work
After law school, Kagan clerked for Judge Abner J. Mikva on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, an experience that exposed her to the workings of the federal government and the administrative state. She then clerked for Justice Thurgood Marshall at the Supreme Court of the United States. Marshall's mentorship and example left a deep imprint on her sense of the law's role in safeguarding individual rights and equal justice. Following her clerkships, Kagan practiced at Williams & Connolly in Washington, D.C., developing a reputation for meticulous preparation and clear, persuasive writing.

Academic Career and Entry into Public Service
Kagan joined the University of Chicago Law School faculty in 1991, teaching administrative law, constitutional law, and related subjects. She earned tenure in 1995. The University of Chicago at the time was an energetic intellectual environment; among her colleagues was Barack Obama, who served as a senior lecturer in constitutional law. Kagan's scholarship centered on the structure of the administrative state and the presidency, subjects that would later inform both her government service and her judicial work.

Service in the Clinton Administration
In 1995, Kagan entered the White House as Associate Counsel to President Bill Clinton, and in 1997 became Deputy Assistant to the President for Domestic Policy and Deputy Director of the Domestic Policy Council under DPC Director Bruce Reed. Working across agencies and with congressional staff, she helped coordinate domestic policy initiatives during a period of intense legislative negotiation and regulatory change. In 1999, President Clinton nominated her to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, but the Senate did not act on the nomination before the end of the congressional session.

Harvard Law School Leadership
Kagan returned to academia in 1999 as a visiting professor at Harvard Law School and joined the permanent faculty soon thereafter. In 2003, President Lawrence H. Summers appointed her dean, succeeding Robert C. Clark. She became the first woman to lead Harvard Law School. As dean, Kagan focused on bridging ideological divides, recruiting a broad range of scholars, and improving the student experience. She championed curricular innovation, notably the introduction of a first-year course in legislation and regulation to complement traditional common-law subjects. She expanded clinical offerings and undertook major capital projects that modernized the campus. Her appointments included prominent scholars across the spectrum, such as Jack Goldsmith and John Manning, signaling her belief that a great law school benefits from robust intellectual diversity. During debates over military recruiting and the "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" policy, she publicly criticized the policy's discrimination while ensuring the school complied with governing law after the Supreme Court's decision in Rumsfeld v. FAIR. When she left in 2009, she was succeeded as dean by Martha Minow.

Solicitor General of the United States
In 2009, President Barack Obama selected Kagan to serve as Solicitor General of the United States, making her the first woman to hold that post. Confirmed by the Senate, she led the Office of the Solicitor General, supervising the government's Supreme Court litigation and personally arguing several high-profile cases. Working with principal deputies and a team of career advocates, she navigated a docket that spanned constitutional law, administrative law, and statutory interpretation. Her advocacy emphasized clarity, candor, and careful respect for precedent, traits that would define her later judicial opinions.

Associate Justice of the Supreme Court
President Obama nominated Kagan in 2010 to succeed Justice John Paul Stevens as an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court. After confirmation by the Senate, she took her seat in August 2010 as the 112th Justice and the fourth woman in the Court's history. She joined what has been known as the Roberts Court, serving alongside Chief Justice John G. Roberts, Jr., and Justices Antonin Scalia, Anthony M. Kennedy, Clarence Thomas, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen G. Breyer, and Sonia Sotomayor. Over the years, the Court's composition shifted to include Justices Samuel A. Alito, Jr., Neil M. Gorsuch, Brett M. Kavanaugh, Amy Coney Barrett, and Ketanji Brown Jackson. In her early terms, Kagan recused herself from a number of cases in which she had participated as Solicitor General, an approach reflecting her fidelity to judicial ethics and institutional legitimacy.

Judicial Work and Jurisprudence
Kagan is widely recognized for lucid prose, pragmatic reasoning, and a disciplined approach to precedent. She has written key majority opinions including Kimble v. Marvel Entertainment (2015), which underscored the stabilizing function of stare decisis in patent law; Kisor v. Wilkie (2019), refining but preserving judicial deference to agencies' interpretations of their own regulations; Allen v. Cooper (2020), addressing state sovereign immunity in the copyright context; Wooden v. United States (2022), clarifying the Armed Career Criminal Act's "occasions" clause; and Jack Daniel's Properties, Inc. v. VIP Products LLC (2023), delineating the interaction of trademark law and parody. She has also authored notable dissents, including in Rucho v. Common Cause (2019), where she argued that partisan gerrymandering undermines democratic accountability, and in Brnovich v. Democratic National Committee (2021), expressing concern about restrictions on voting access.

Her judicial method balances text, structure, history, and practical consequences. Drawing on her administrative law scholarship and her experience in the executive branch, she often engages deeply with how statutes function in the real world. While she has frequently joined opinions by colleagues such as Justices Breyer and Sotomayor in statutory and administrative cases, she has also formed cross-ideological coalitions with Justices Gorsuch and Roberts on questions of statutory interpretation, reflecting her emphasis on consensus where possible.

Public Profile and Influence
Kagan's career has been shaped by mentors and colleagues across institutions: Abner Mikva and Thurgood Marshall in the judiciary; Bill Clinton and Bruce Reed in the policy arena; Lawrence Summers, Robert Clark, and Martha Minow in academic leadership; and Barack Obama in both academia and government. On the Supreme Court she worked closely with Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen Breyer, and she has continued to engage collegially with a changing roster of colleagues including Sonia Sotomayor, Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, John Roberts, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, Amy Coney Barrett, and Ketanji Brown Jackson. Her legacy to date is that of a lawyer's lawyer: a careful institutionalist, a teacher at heart, and a justice whose opinions are accessible to practitioners, students, and citizens alike.

Our collection contains 15 quotes who is written by Elena, under the main topics: Witty One-Liners - Wisdom - Justice - Leadership - Work Ethic.