Elena Kagan is the current Solicitor General. President Obama is expected to announce this morning that she is his pick to replace Justice John Paul Stevens who is retiring from the Supreme Court.
Here’s what we know about Elena Kagan:
- As Solicitor General she conducts all litigation on behalf of the United States in the Supreme Court
- She has never served as a judge
- She was the first woman Dean of Harvard Law School
- While at Harvard Law she banned military recruiters from campus because of the discriminatory “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy
- Also at Harvard Law, she hired 32 tenured and tenure-track hires, but only one was a minority and only seven were women; four out of every five hires were white men
- She worked in the Clinton administration as a domestic policy aide
- She clerked for Justice Thurgood Marshall
- She has a bachelor’s degree from Princeton, a master’s degree from Oxford and a law degree from Harvard
- She is 50 years old and would be the youngest member of the Supreme Court.
No doubt the media will have much more to say about her in the next few weeks and we will learn more about her stance on hot button issues.
Kagan’s anticipated nomination is encouraging for those of us calling for gender diversity and a critical mass of women in leadership. President Obama is reported to have interviewed four people for this opening, two men and two women – a search that is representative of the U.S. population. If appointed, she would join two other women Justices, bringing the gender mix to thirty percent women, sixty percent men.
But a Kagan appointment would not improve diversity in other areas. The New York Times reports that if Kagan joins the high court, every member would have studied law at Harvard or Yale. Kagan would be the third Jewish Justice, the other six are Catholic. And the Court would remain predominantly white with only one African American and of course, one “wise Latina.”
Kagan has a solid resume and is clearly a highly intelligent person. She has broad experience off the bench, a proven backbone to fight injustice, and a touted ability to bridge divides among groups with opposing views. Those traits are all encouraging. Now we watch as the ideological and partisan games begin.
