U.S. Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan ’81 and Nobel Prize-winning economist David Card *83 will receive top alumni honors

Princeton University will present its highest honors to graduates Elena Kagan ’81, associate justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, and David Card *83, professor emeritus of economics at the University of California, Berkeley.

Kagan, who graduated from Princeton with a bachelor’s degree in history, will receive the Woodrow Wilson Award. Card, who received his Ph.D. in economics, will receive the James Madison Medal. These awards will be presented Graduates Daywhich will be held on campus on Saturday, February 22, 2025.

The university awards Woodrow Wilson Award annually to an undergraduate or graduate whose career embodies the call to duty expressed in Wilson’s 1896 speech, “Princeton in the Service of the Nation.” A Princeton graduate and professor, Wilson served as president of the university, governor of New Jersey, and president of the United States.

James Madison Medalfounded by the Princeton Alumni Association (APGA), named after the fourth President of the United States, believed to be Princeton’s first graduate student. It is awarded each year to honor a graduate or graduate who has had a distinguished career, advanced the cause of graduate education, or achieved outstanding achievement in public service.

Woodrow Wilson Award Winner

Photo courtesy of Steve Pettway; Collection of the US Supreme Court

“Elena Kagan is a brilliant legal mind who has dedicated herself to the rule of law at every stage of her impressive career,” said Princeton University President Christopher L. Eisgruber ’83. “As the first woman to serve as U.S. Attorney General, dean of Harvard Law School, and associate justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, she has played a special leadership role in American jurisprudence.”

Kagan was born and raised in Manhattan, New York, the daughter of a lawyer and a schoolteacher and the granddaughter of Russian Jewish immigrants. She arrived at Princeton in 1977 as a diligent student interested in American history and delving into library archives. She soon became a rising star at The Daily Princetonian, eventually serving as editorial chairman and writing daily columns for the student newspaper.

During a university event with President Eisgruber in 2014, Kagan said Princeton forced her to think about issues and problems in different ways. “I had fantastic professors who were so generous with their time,” she said. “Everything I know about writing I learned here.”

After graduating with honors in 1981, Kagan was awarded a prestigious scholarship to Oxford, where she received a Master of Philosophy. She received her J.D. from Harvard Law School, where she was editor of the Harvard Law Review. After Harvard, Kagan clerked for Judge Abner Mikva of the Washington, D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals and then for Justice Thurgood Marshall of the U.S. Supreme Court.

Kagan subsequently became a professor of law, first at the University of Chicago and then at Harvard Law School. Meanwhile, she spent four years in the Clinton administration as a junior White House adviser and deputy assistant for domestic policy. From 2003 to 2009, she was the first female dean of Harvard Law School, where she was known for building consensus and modernizing the curriculum.

In 2009, Kagan became the first woman to serve as solicitor general, the government’s top lawyer on the Supreme Court, before President Obama nominated her to the bench the following year, where she became the fourth woman and 11th Princeton graduate to sit on the Supreme Court. the highest court.

During her 14 years on the bench, Kagan won the admiration of legal scholars for the clarity and accessibility of her opinions and her ability to find common ground.

James Madison Medalist

As part of a group of economists who pioneered the use of natural experiments to study economics, David Card sparked a revolution in economics through rigorous analysis of real-world problems. His research on the minimum wage, immigration, and education revealed gaps in knowledge that contradicted conventional wisdom, inspiring a generation of economists to test prevailing economic theories through empirical research.

The map was jointly awarded the 2021 Nobel Prize in Economics. for providing “new insights into the labor market” and shared the prize with MIT economics professor Joshua Angrist *89 and Stanford University applied econometrics professor Guido Imbens. In announcing the prize, the Nobel Committee said that the approach taken by the three economists — the use of natural experiments—spread to medicine and other social sciences, changing research conducted in other fields.

“David Card’s brilliant scholarship has advanced the world’s understanding of important policy issues and basic economic principles,” Eisgruber said. “Along with changing the way economists think about the labor market, especially with regard to the minimum wage, his work has contributed to changing the way empirical research is conducted.”

Card’s journey began on his family’s dairy farm in Guelph, Ontario, where he learned the value of hard work that will talk about his academic studies later. While a student at Queen’s University in Ontario, he worked in a steel mill (among other odd jobs), which fueled his interest in labor economics and income inequality. After Card received his Ph.D. Receiving a PhD in economics from Princeton in 1983, he taught at the university until 1996 and then accepted a professorship at the University of California, Berkeley, eventually becoming the Class of 1950 Professor of Economics.

During his career, Card published a series of studies on topics ranging from wage determination to inequality and gender issues. By analyzing so-called natural experiments—real events that radically changed the economy in a short period of time—he and his colleagues were able to empirically reveal how the economy works.

For example, to understand immigration, Card studied the impact of the Mariel boat lift, which caused a sudden influx of Cuban immigrants to Miami in 1980. Despite a 7% increase in the labor force, he showed through intensive statistical analysis that the mass immigration of Cubans did not lead to lower wages and higher unemployment rates in Miami. Later, in one of the most cited papers on immigration economics, Card worked with Alan Krueger at Princeton to study fast food restaurant jobs in New Jersey and Pennsylvania. They found that, contrary to long-accepted economic theory, modest increases in the minimum wage did not lead to job losses.

A consistent thread running through Card’s work is the belief that hard data and innovative research can be used to challenge conventional wisdom about how the economy works. “Design-based research is particularly useful for testing the basic predictions of a theory or testing competing theories,” Card said in his 2021 Nobel speech. “Transparent, design-based research can play an important role in opening the door to a new approach or a new class of models.”

The awards will be presented in Richardson Auditorium during the 110th Alumni Day ceremony, which will also recognize student winners of the Jacobus Scholarship and the Pyne Honor Prize. The Alumni Day program will also include the annual Alumni Association luncheon at Jadwin Grammar School and a service of remembrance in Princeton Chapel honoring Princeton University alumni, students, and faculty and staff whose deaths were recorded by the university in 2024.