Elena Kagan
Photo courtesy of Steve Petteway; Collection of the Supreme Court of the United States
U.S. Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan ’81 and Nobel Prize-winning economist David Card *83 to receive top alumni awards.
Princeton University will present its top awards for alumni to Elena Kagan ’81, associate justice of the Supreme Court of the United States, and David Card *83, emeritus professor 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 earned a Ph.D. in economics, will receive the James Madison Medal. These awards will be presented on Alumni Day, to be held on campus on Saturday, Feb. 22, 2025.
The University bestows the Woodrow Wilson Award annually upon an undergraduate alumna or alumnus whose career embodies the call to duty in Wilson’s 1896 speech, “Princeton in the Nation’s Service.” A Princeton graduate and faculty member, Wilson served as president of the University, governor of New Jersey and president of the United States.
The James Madison Medal, established by the Association of Princeton Graduate Alumni (APGA), is named for the fourth president of the United States, who is considered to be Princeton’s first graduate student. It is presented each year to celebrate an alumna or alumnus of the Graduate School who has had a distinguished career, advanced the cause of graduate education or achieved an outstanding record of public service.
Woodrow Wilson Award recipient
Elena Kagan
“Elena Kagan is a blazing legal intellect who has dedicated herself to the rule of law at every stage of her formidable career,” said Princeton University President Christopher L. Eisgruber ’83. “As the first woman to serve as U.S. solicitor general, as dean of the Harvard Law School, and as an associate justice of the United States Supreme Court, she has played a distinctive 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, a diligent student with a fondness for American history and digging through library archives. Soon enough, she became a rising star at The Daily Princetonian, ultimately serving as editorial chair and writing daily columns for the student paper.
During a University event with President Eisgruber in 2014, Kagan said Princeton compelled her to think of issues and problems in different ways. “I had fantastic professors who were so generous with their time,” she said. “Whatever I know about writing, I learned here.”
After graduating summa cum laude in 1981, Kagan was awarded a prestigious fellowship to study at Oxford where she earned her master’s in philosophy. She earned her J.D. from Harvard Law School where she was editor of the Harvard Law Review. After Harvard, Kagan clerked for Judge Abner Mikva on the Washington, D.C., Circuit Court of Appeals, and then for Justice Thurgood Marshall on the U.S. Supreme Court.
Kagan went on to become a law professor, first at the University of Chicago and later at Harvard Law School. In between, she served four years in the Clinton administration as associate White House counsel 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 before the Supreme Court, before President Obama nominated her to the bench the following year, where she became the fourth woman and the 11th Princeton alum to sit on the highest court.
Over her 14 years on the court, Kagan has won the admiration of legal scholars for the clarity and accessibility of her opinions and her ability to find common ground.
James Madison medalist
David Card
As part of a cadre of economists who pioneered the use of natural experiments to study the economy, David Card sparked a revolution in the field of economics through rigorous analysis of real-world problems. His studies on minimum wage, immigration and education exposed knowledge gaps that ran counter to conventional wisdom, inspiring a generation of economists to test prevailing economic theories through empirical research.
Card was jointly awarded the 2021 Nobel Prize in economics for providing “new insights about the labor market” and shared the prize with MIT economics professor Joshua Angrist *89 and Stanford applied econometrics professor Guido Imbens. When announcing the prize, the Nobel Committee said the approach used by the three economists — using natural experiments — had spread to medicine and other social sciences, transforming the research done in other fields.
“David Card’s brilliant scholarship has advanced the world’s understanding of important policy issues and basic principles of economics,” Eisgruber said. “Along with changing the way economists think about the labor market, especially regarding the minimum wage, his work contributed to changing the way empirical research is done.”
Card’s journey began on his family’s dairy farm in Guelph, Ontario, where he developed an appreciation for hard work that would later inform his academic pursuits. While an undergraduate at Queen’s University in Ontario, he worked in a steel factory – among other odd jobs – which fueled his interest in labor economics and income inequality. After Card received his Ph.D. in economics from Princeton in 1983, he taught at the University until 1996 before accepting a professorship position at the University of California-Berkeley, and eventually becoming the Class of 1950 Professor of Economics.
Over the course of his career, Card has published a series of studies on topics that varied from wage determination to inequality and gender-related issues. By analyzing so called natural experiments — real-life events that radically shifted the economy over a short period of time — he and his colleagues were able to empirically reveal how an economy operates.
For instance, to understand immigration, Card studied the impact of the Mariel boatlift, which brought a sudden influx of Cuban immigrants to Miami in 1980. Despite increasing the labor force by 7%, he showed through intense statistical analysis that the mass immigration of Cubans didn’t lead to lower wages and higher unemployment rates in Miami. Later, in one of the most cited papers in 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.
The consistent thread running through Card’s work is the belief in using hard data and innovative research to challenge conventional wisdom about how the economy operates. “Design-based studies are particularly useful for testing basic predictions of a theory or testing between competing theories,” Card said in his 2021 Nobel speech. “Transparent design-based studies 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 ceremonies, which also will recognize student winners of the Jacobus Fellowship and the Pyne Honor Prize. The Alumni Day program will also feature the annual Alumni Association luncheon at Jadwin Gymnasium and the Service of Remembrance at the Princeton Chapel, honoring alumni, students, and members of the Princeton University faculty and staff whose deaths were recorded by the University in 2024.