Associate Justice

Institutional context

Kagan is the fourth woman on the Supreme Court of the United States. Her confirmation in 2010 brought the simultaneous female composition of the Court to three (Ginsburg, Sotomayor, Kagan), the highest in the Court's history to that date.

Career path

Kagan earned a BA from Princeton, an MPhil from Worcester College, Oxford, and a JD from Harvard Law School. She clerked for Judge Abner Mikva on the DC Circuit and for Justice Thurgood Marshall on the Supreme Court. She held faculty positions at the University of Chicago Law School and Harvard Law School, becoming Dean of Harvard Law in 2003 — the first woman in that role. She served as Solicitor General of the United States from 2009, the first woman in that role.

Appointment

President Obama nominated her on 10 May 2010 to succeed Justice John Paul Stevens. The Senate confirmed her on 5 August 2010 by 63–37, and she was sworn in on 7 August 2010.

Tenure

Active. Her opinions and dissents include the dissents in Rucho v. Common Cause (2019) and West Virginia v. EPA (2022).

Cluster context

Kagan's 2010 appointment falls in the dataset's slow-rise middle period and is part of the Court's longer-running first-woman trajectory. The first-woman pattern at Solicitor General that immediately preceded her Supreme Court appointment is itself notable: Kagan was the first woman in two distinct senior federal-legal roles in consecutive years.

Sources

• Supreme Court of the United States — Past Justices
• Federal Judicial Center — Kagan biography