Elena Kagan

Elena Kagan joined the Supreme Court in 2010 as the first justice in nearly four decades with no prior experience as a judge. She was born on April 28, 1960, in New York City and grew up on Manhattan's Upper West Side, the daughter of a lawyer and a schoolteacher. She graduated from Princeton University in 1981, studied at Oxford on a Princeton fellowship, and received her law degree from Harvard Law School in 1986. She clerked for Judge Abner Mikva of the D.C. Circuit and then for Justice Thurgood Marshall before practicing law in Washington and teaching at the University of Chicago Law School.

Kagan worked in the Clinton White House as associate counsel and then as deputy director of the Domestic Policy Council. President Bill Clinton nominated her to the D.C. Circuit in 1999, but the Senate never acted on the nomination. She returned to Harvard Law School and in 2003 became its first woman dean, serving until 2009. That year President Barack Obama chose her as solicitor general, the federal government's chief advocate before the Supreme Court, and she became the first woman to hold the post. In 2010 Obama nominated her to succeed Justice John Paul Stevens, and the Senate confirmed her 63 to 37 on August 5, 2010.

Kagan is part of the Court's liberal wing and is widely noted for clear, conversational writing that explains legal doctrine to general readers. She wrote the majority opinion in Kisor v. Wilkie (2019), which preserved, with new limits, the rule that courts defer to an agency's reasonable reading of its own regulations, and Kimble v. Marvel Entertainment (2015), a patent-royalty case remembered for its Spider-Man references. She has written major dissents, including in Rucho v. Common Cause (2019), which held that federal courts cannot decide claims of partisan gerrymandering, and in Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo (2024), which overruled the Chevron doctrine of deference to agency interpretations of statutes. Court observers often describe her as a justice who seeks narrow agreements across ideological lines.