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Solicitor General Elena Kagan
Elena Kagan (b. 1960) is the Solicitor General of the United States and the former dean
of Harvard Law School. Solicitor Kagan has an impressive academic and professional
background. She graduated from Princeton University with honors, received her Master of
Philosophy from Oxford, and obtained her J.D. with honors from Harvard, where she was the
supervising editor of the Harvard Law Review. After law school, she clerked for Judge Abner
Mikva of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit and for Supreme Court Justice Thurgood
Marshall. Solicitor Kagan followed her clerkships with time in private practice as an associate at
Williams & Connolly, LLP. In 1991, she moved to the academic field as a professor at the
University of Chicago School of Law, obtaining tenure in 1995. While teaching at the
University of Chicago, she focused on administrative law and First Amendment issues, and she
took on a special assignment as senior counsel to then-Senator Joe Biden, who was chair of the
Senate Judiciary Committee.
Between 1995 and 2000, Solicitor Kagan served as President Bill Clinton’s Associate
White House Counsel, deputy assistant to the President for Domestic Policy, and deputy director
of the Domestic Policy Council. In 1999, President Clinton nominated her for a seat on the U.S.
Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, but the Senate Judiciary Committee, chaired by Orrin
Hatch, never scheduled her hearing. In 2001, she became a visiting professor at Harvard Law
School, and in 2003 she was named dean, where she is credited with being open to ideological
balance on her faculty. She also oversaw a $476 million capital fundraising campaign and
revamped the school’s core curriculum.
Last year, President Obama nominated her to be Solicitor General, and, despite some
opposition because she had never argued a case before the Supreme Court, she was confirmed by
the Senate, 61-31,1 in March 2009, making her the first woman