Elena Kagan
Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States since 2010

Elena Kagan ( KAY-gən; born April 28, 1960) is an American lawyer who serves as an associate justice of the Supreme Court of the United States. She was appointed in 2010 by President Barack Obama and is the fourth woman to serve on the Court.
Kagan was born and raised in New York City. After graduating from Princeton University, Worcester College, Oxford, and Harvard Law School, she clerked for a federal Court of Appeals judge and for Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall. She began her career as a professor at the University of Chicago Law School, leaving to serve as Associate White House Counsel, and later as a policy adviser under President Bill Clinton. After a nomination to the United States Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, which expired without action, she became a professor at Harvard Law School and was later named its first female dean.
In 2009, Kagan became the first female solicitor general of the United States. The following year, President Obama nominated her to the Supreme Court to fill the vacancy arising from the impending retirement of Justice John Paul Stevens. The United States Senate confirmed her nomination by a vote of 63–37. As of 2022, she is the most recent justice appointed without any prior judicial experience.
“Elena Kagan” enters the record as associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States since 2010. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Elena, Kagan and Associate can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 16, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q11105. VIAF identifies the subject as 61128699. The Library of Congress control number is no95027810. 3 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1960, 2010, 2009 and 2022.
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This entry incorporates text from “Elena Kagan” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.