Elena Kagan

Kagan joined the Supreme Court in August 2010 on the nomination of President Barack Obama. Born in New York in 1960, she studied at Princeton, Oxford and Harvard Law School and clerked for Justice Thurgood Marshall. She later taught at Chicago and Harvard, led Harvard Law School as dean from 2003 to 2009, and was the federal government's chief advocate before the Court as Solicitor General. She is the most recent justice to join the bench without prior service as a judge.

With Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson she forms the Court's liberal minority. In 2026 that group has repeatedly lost on emergency applications about elections, decided without full argument. Kagan dissented from the unsigned 2 June stay that restored Alabama's contested congressional map a week after a lower court blocked it.

In September she joined Jackson's dissent from the order reviving Homeland Security's SAVE checks of voter rolls, a dispute whose pre-election limits the court will hear on 8 December.