Friends Describe Kagan As A Real New Yorker
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NY1’s Bobby Cuza takes a look at the career of Supreme Court Justice nominee Elena Kagan. She's studied at Princeton and Oxford, taught at Harvard and the University of Chicago and worked in the White House. But before all that, Elena Kagan was a New York City school kid.
Born and raised in the city, Kagan attended Hunter College High School on the Upper East Side, class of 1977. Alongside her senior yearbook photo are two quotes – one from Mark Twain, the other from Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter: “Government is itself an art. One of the subtlest of arts.”
"I don’t think anybody’s going to accidentally think that she’s from the Deep South. She’s a New Yorker, at least in her style and her mannerisms,” said the Brennan Center for Justice’s Michael Waldman, a friend and former colleague of Kagan’s. “She’s got a great sense of humor. She’s tough. She’s very funny.”
After graduating from Harvard Law School in 1986, Kagan clerked for Justice Thurgood Marshall, the high court's first African-American. Kagan would later break some of her own barriers. She became the first female dean of Harvard Law in 2003. While there, she supported barring military recruiters from campus because she opposed the military's Don't Ask, Don't Tell policy, once calling it “a moral injustice of the first order.”
Last year, Kagan notched another first when President Barack Obama named her solicitor general, the first female to hold the position. In that role, Kagan argues cases before the Supreme Court on behalf of the federal government. Her first oral argument came in the Citizens United case, where the court struck down limits on corporate spending on political campaigns.
Kagan also spent several years in the Clinton White House, where she was associate counsel and also worked on domestic policy. Waldman was Clinton’s head speechwriter at the time.
"When she worked in the White House, the White House chief of staff gave her a nickname. He called her the ‘smartest person in the White House,’” recalled Waldman. “And that was saying a lot."
Kagan, who just turned 50, will be the court's youngest member if confirmed by the Senate.