First woman Solicitor General? Obama's top candidates are female

By GottaLaff

Your honor, I don't object!

Bloomberg reports that the first female deans of the Harvard and Stanford law schools — Elena Kagan and Kathleen Sullivan — “are the top candidates to serve” as Barack Obama’s Solicitor General. No woman has ever served in that position on a permanent basis. Kagan “became a top candidate for solicitor general after being passed over for deputy attorney general, a slot set to go to Washington lawyer David Ogden.” The Solicitor General is charged with litigating on behalf of the government before the Supreme Court and determining whether lower court decisions should be appealed.

Some background:
Elena Kagan:

She was a law clerk for Judge Abner Mikva on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit and for Justice Thurgood Marshall of the U.S. Supreme Court. In private practice, Kagan was an associate at the Washington, D.C., law firm of Williams & Connolly.

From 1995 to 1999, Dean Kagan served as Associate Counsel to U.S. President Bill Clinton and Deputy Assistant to the President for Domestic Policy and Deputy Director of the Domestic Policy Counsel.

On June 17, 1999, President Clinton nominated Kagan to serve as a Judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, to replace James L. Buckley, who had taken senior status three years earlier. However, the Republican-led Senate Judiciary Committee declined to bring her nomination forward for a hearing.

[As Dean of Harvard Law School] she has been credited for bringing new vigor to her post and for employing a consensus-building leadership style. [...] Kagan is also credited with overcoming ideological disputes among the Law School faculty that had hindered new faculty appointments.

Kathleen Sullivan:

Born in Sault Sainte Marie, Michigan, Sullivan graduated from Cornell University in 1976, and graduated as a Marshall Scholar from Oxford in 1978. Sullivan then graduated from Harvard Law School in 1981, where her mentor Laurence Tribe called her "the most extraordinary student I had ever had."

Sullivan's expertise is in the area of constitutional law. She is the author of a leading text in the field,^[3] Constitutional Law, with the late Professor Gerald Gunther.

After law school, Sullivan worked for one year as a law clerk for Judge James L. Oakes on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit.^[2] She also worked briefly as a constitutional litigator in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

A lesbian, Sullivan has filed amicus curiae briefs in many cases before the U.S. Supreme Court over the years dealing with gay rights,^[8] including Bowers v. Hardwick and Lawrence v. Texas