Facts about Elizabeth Warren
Elizabeth Warren Biography
Elizabeth Warren was a Harvard law professor and a leading consumer advocate before being elected to the U.S. Senate from Massachusetts in 2012.
Elizabeth Warren was a champion debater in high school in Oklahoma, graduating at age 16 and heading to George Washington University. At age 19 she married Jim Warren, a childhood sweetheart, and moved with him to Houston where he was a NASA engineer on the Apollo moon program. She finished her degree at the University of Houston (1970) and had their first child, Amelia, in 1971.
In 1976 she had a son, Alexander, and earned a law degree from Rutgers University. By the time she and Jim Warren divorced in 1978, she was teaching law classes at Rutgers. She taught law at several colleges before landing at Harvard Law School in 1992.
By then she had co-authored a book, As We Forgive Our Debtors: Bankruptcy and Consumer Credit in America (1989), and established herself as an expert in bankruptcy and consumer law and what she has called the “hollowing out of the middle class.” After the financial collapse of 2008, Warren was called by Senate majority leader Harry Reid to lead a panel overseeing the TARP bailout. That led to the creation of a new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau as part of the 2010 Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act.
Warren seemed the natural fit to run the bureau, but Republican leaders and a coalition of Wall Street firms fought the idea, apparently fearing she would be too active in carrying out the bureau’s mission. President Barack Obama declined to nominate her for the post, and instead Warren chose run for the U.S. Senate from Massachusetts in the elections of 2012.
Campaigning as an outspoken defender of the middle class and the little guy, she defeated incumbent Republican Scott Brown and became the first woman ever elected to the Senate from Massachusetts. She won reelection in 2018, and in December of that year announced that she would be a Democratic candidate for president in 2020.
Extra credit
President Donald Trump has often called Elizabeth Warren “Pocahontas” in an attempt to taunt her. Warren says that her family lore indicates that she has some distant Native American ancestors; she once listed herself as a minority in the directory of the Association of American Law Schools. Genealogical research into Warren’s past has neither proved or disproved that ancestry, but a thorough review of Warren’s employment history by the Boston Globe in 2018 showed that she had never been considered as a minority during the hiring process at any of her law school jobs. Warren has called Trump’s use of the name Pocahontas an inappropriate racial epithet that is offensive to Native Americans… Elizabeth Warren married her second husband, Bruce Mann, in 1980. They have no children together. He also is a professor at Harvard Law School, having joined the faculty in 2006… As We Forgive Our Debtors was co-written with Teresa A. Sullivan and Jay Lawrence Westbrook… Her other books include Laws of Debtors and Creditors: Text, Cases and Problems (1986, written with Jay Lawrence Westbrook) and All Your Worth: The Ultimate Lifetime Money Plan (2005, written with her daughter Amelia Warren Tyagi)… The Senate seat she won from Scott Brown had previously been held for many years by Ted Kennedy. Kennedy was last reelected in 2006 and died in 2009, and Brown was the surprise winner of a special election to fill the seat through the end of the six-year term.