Elena Kagan

Her father represented tenants trying to stay in their apartments and her mother taught at Hunter College Elementary School. Both her brothers became public high school teachers. The family lived on the third floor at West End Avenue and 75th Street, three generations out of Bialystok and the Russian Pale. She went to the Orthodox rabbi of Lincoln Square Synagogue with firm opinions about what her bat mitzvah should look like, which were not the rabbi's opinions, and the two of them negotiated. Hunter College High School came next, then Princeton, where her senior thesis on the New York Socialist Party ended by calling its self-destruction a chastening story for anyone who still wanted to change America. Then Oxford, then Harvard Law, magna cum laude, in 1986.

She clerked for Abner Mikva, who called her the pick of the litter, and then for Thurgood Marshall, who hired her to put the spark back into his opinions as the Court moved right and who called her Shorty. She taught at Chicago from 1991 and argued in print that First Amendment cases should turn on what the government was trying to do. She worked in Bill Clinton's White House, and when he nominated her to the D.C. Circuit in 1999 the Judiciary Committee chairman declined to schedule a hearing and the nomination died. So she went to Harvard Law and ran it for six years, rebuilding the first-year curriculum, hiring across the ideological line, calming a faculty at war, and putting out free coffee. A year as solicitor general followed, the first woman in the job. Then the Court.

The job that got her there is why she could not do it at first. Having been solicitor general, she was forced out of 28 of the 78 cases the Court heard in her first term. The fight that nearly stopped the nomination was older. As dean she kept military recruiters out of Harvard's career services office because Don't Ask, Don't Tell excluded gay and lesbian students, supported a suit against the Solomon Amendment, and shut them out again when a lower court let her. The Supreme Court ruled against the schools, and she let the recruiters back in while urging students to demonstrate. She had also promised a senator from Idaho, who doubted a New Yorker could grasp hunting, that she would learn. She kept the promise with Antonin Scalia, who laughed and took her to his club.

She writes better than anyone else on the Court, which is a real form of power. Her 2015 opinion in a patent case about a toy Spider-Man web-shooter is studded with comic-book jokes and is also the reason a patent holder cannot collect royalties after the patent runs out. Her dissents in the partisan-gerrymandering and climate-regulation cases are the ones law students are assigned. She spent her first decade trying to build majorities and, since the Court overturned Roe v. Wade, has said publicly that it is moving too fast and too far. She is 66 and still sitting, which means none of this is settled. Nobody writing about her now is writing a verdict.

Elena Kagan's life against the full span of the corpus — the fading end marks a life still in progress.

• To the Final Conflict: Socialism in New York City, 1900-1933 article
  Her Princeton senior thesis, written under Sean Wilentz 1981
• Private Speech, Public Purpose article
  Her argument that the First Amendment should examine governmental motive 1996
• Kimble v. Marvel Entertainment case
  Majority opinion, full of Spider-Man jokes, on royalties after a patent expires 2015
• Rucho v. Common Cause case
  Dissent, on the Court refusing to police partisan gerrymandering 2019
• Chiafalo v. Washington case
  Majority opinion, on states binding presidential electors 2020
• West Virginia v. EPA case
  Dissent, on the major questions doctrine and climate regulation 2022

• 1981 aged ~21 Graduates from Princeton summa cum laude in history
• 1987 aged ~27 Begins a clerkship with Justice Thurgood Marshall He called her Shorty and wanted the spark back in his opinions.
• 1995 aged ~35 Wins tenure at the University of Chicago Law School and joins the Clinton White House
• June 17, 1999 aged 39 Nominated to the D.C. Circuit, and never given a hearing The nomination lapsed with the Senate term.
• July 1, 2003 aged 43 Becomes the first woman to serve as dean of Harvard Law School
• March 19, 2009 aged 48 Sworn in as the first female solicitor general of the United States She argued Citizens United for the government.
• August 5, 2010 aged 50 Confirmed to the Supreme Court, 63 to 37 She took the oath two days later, on August 7.
• 2011 aged ~51 Recuses herself from 28 of the 78 cases in her first term Her year as solicitor general had touched too many of them.
• 2022 aged ~62 After Dobbs, she becomes publicly critical of the Court's direction She had spent a decade trying to build consensus instead.

• Thurgood Marshall 1908–1993
  First African American Supreme Court Justice and lead attorney in Brown v. Board of Education. clerked for him
• Antonin Scalia 1936–2016
  Justice whose advocacy of originalism and textualism transformed American legal interpretation. sparring partner and hunting companion
• Barack Obama b. 1961
  44th President and first African American to hold the office, known for the Affordable Care Act. appointed her
• Bill Clinton b. 1946
  42nd president whose centrist politics, economic agenda, and impeachment shaped the post-Cold War era. nominated her to a seat she never got
• Ruth Bader Ginsburg 1933–2020
  Supreme Court Justice whose advocacy for gender equality made her a cultural icon. the senior liberal she wrote alongside