Who Is Elena Kagan?

(CANVAS STAFF REPORTS) - So just who is Elena Kagan?

President Barack Obama on Monday nominated Solicitor General Elena Kagan to the Supreme Court, declaring she would demonstrate the same independence, integrity and passion for the law exhibited by retiring Justice John Paul Stevens, reported The Associated Press.

Some facts about Elena Kagan: she is 50; she's Jewish. According to The Washington Post , she's unmarried, has never had children and is such a native New Yorker that she didn't learn to drive a car until she was in her late twenties – and a friend says she still hasn't mastered that skill completely.

What she has mastered is being a lawyer. She received a J.D., magna cum laude, from Harvard Law School in 1986, according to her bio on Wikipedia . She clerked for Justice Thurgood Marshall of the Supreme Court in 1987-88. The Washington Post quotes her as saying Marshall was "the most important lawyer of the 20th century." He returned the compliment by giving her the nickname "Shorty."

Kagan spent three years working for the legal team in President Clinton's administration. Clinton later nominated her to serve as a judge on the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals, but the Republican-dominated Senate never gave her a hearing.

In 1999 she became a visiting professor at Harvard Law School and then in 2003 the school's Dean. While serving as Dean, she supported a long-standing policy barring military recruiters from campus because she felt the military's "Don't ask, don't tell" policy discriminated against gays and lesbians. According to FOX News she is quoted in an email at the time saying: "I abhor the military's discriminatory recruitment policy."

From 2005 through 2008, Kagan was a member of the Research Advisory Council of the Goldman Sachs Global Markets Institute – the same Goldman Sachs that has been in the news recently.

President Obama nominated her as Solicitor General to his administration in January of 2009 and she was confirmed in March of that year. Since then, she's argued several cases with the justices on the Supreme Court and according to Fox News enjoys a good rapport with them.

Some critics on the left are concerned with some of her legal arguments, particularly her statement during her Solicitor General confirmation hearings . She stated duringt he hearing that someone suspected of helping finance Al Qaeda should be subject to battlefield law, meaning indefinite detention without a trial, even if he were captured in a place like the Philippines rather than a physical battle zone.

The New York Times writes that she has stated that she finds the death penalty constitutional and that "there is no federal constitutional right to same-sex marriage."

There have been questions about Kagan's sexuality . In April when she first surfaced as a possible nominee to the Supreme Court, a writer at The Atlantic magazine wrote about the whispers that she could be gay.

CBS News also posted a report from a blogger who claimed Kagan is gay. But after an administration official said she is not a lesbian, CBS removed the post , calling it speculation.