Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan will be on campus this week to present the annual Rose Lecture. The event will take place at 1:00 p.m. Friday, October 19, in the Alumni Memorial Building Cox Auditorium.
Sponsored by the College of Law, the lecture is open to law students, faculty, staff, and alumni, as well as members of the federal, state, and local judiciary, university administrators, and other members of the campus community.
The program format will be a conversation between Associate Justice Kagan and the College of Law dean, Doug Blaze.
President Barack Obama appointed Kagan to the U.S. Supreme Court in 2010. She is the court’s 112th justice and its fourth female justice.
She is the third sitting Supreme Court justice to visit UT in twenty-two years. The College of Law hosted Justice Clarence Thomas in 2010 and Justice Antonin Scalia in 1990. In addition, retired Justice Sandra Day O’Connor visited UT in 2008 to help open the Howard H. Baker Jr. Center for Public Policy.
Associate Justice Kagan, 52, was born in New York, New York. She received her bachelor’s degree from Princeton University in 1981, her Master of Philosophy degree from Oxford University in 1983, and her law degree from Harvard Law School in 1986.
Early in her career, she clerked for Judge Abner Mikva of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit and then served as a law clerk for Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall.
After briefly practicing law in a Washington, D.C., law firm, she became a law professor, first at the University of Chicago Law School and later at Harvard Law School.
She served for four years in President Bill Clinton’s administration, first as associate counsel to the president and then as deputy assistant to the president for domestic policy.
From 2003 to 2009, she served as dean of Harvard Law School.
In 2009, President Obama nominated her as the solicitor general of the United States. After she had served in that role for a year, the president nominated her as an associate justice of the Supreme Court on May 10, 2010. She took her seat on Aug. 7, 2010.
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C O N T A C T :
Tanya Brown (865-974-6788, tgbrown@utk.edu)
Amy Blakely (865-974-5034, ablakely@utk.edu)