A Life Rooted In Pursuit of Education
With her Manhattan upbringing and Ivy League credentials, Elena Kagan personifies the East Coast elite, but she has also shown a popular touch in rising to the top as a law-school administrator and government official.
President Barack Obama is counting on the 50-year-old Ms. Kagan's people skills on a Supreme Court that is often sharply divided between liberal and conservative wings. She is a longtime Democrat, going back to her days working on Michael Dukakis's presidential campaign, but has also built ties with influential conservatives.
As dean of Harvard Law School and solicitor general in the Obama administration, Ms. Kagan endeared herself to students and employees for making little improvements—free coffee and a skating rink for students, better eating quarters for faculty at Harvard and dual computer monitors for assistants in the solicitor general's office.
Ms. Kagan was born in New York City on April 28, 1960. Her father was a lawyer and former chairman of a community board on Manhattan's Upper West Side, while her mother taught for many years at Hunter College Elementary School.
Ms. Kagan attended Hunter College Elementary and graduated in 1977 from the selective Hunter College High School, where her brother, Irving, teaches today. She was known as a top student as early as grade school. "Even though she was a year behind me in [elementary] school she