Another Supreme Court Nominee for New York

(May 10) -- Score one more for New York.

This morning, President Barack Obama officially announced that New York City native Elena Kagan will be his second nominee for Supreme Court justice after Sonia Sotomayor, who grew up in the Bronx. Obama joked that Kagan, "a die-hard Mets fan," may meet her first test when she finds herself on the bench next to Sotomayor, a born and bred Yankees fan, "who I believe has ordered a pinstripe robe for the occasion," Obama quipped.

Kagan, 50, grew up on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, a largely Jewish middle-class neighborhood dominated by parks and apartment buildings.

"Where I grew up -- on Manhattan's Upper West Side -- nobody ever admitted to voting for Republicans," Kagan once wrote, according to The New York Times, adding that elected officials during that time were "real Democrats -- not the closet Republicans that one sees so often these days but men and women committed to liberal principles and motivated by the ideal of an affirmative and compassionate government."

Her father, Robert, who was also a lawyer, worked for tenants' rights and was chairman of the local community board, the panoply of which make up the building blocks of New York City government.

"My father was the kind of lawyer who used his skills and training to represent everyday people and to improve a community," she said in her remarks in the East Room of the White House this morning. "My mother was a proud public school teacher."

In the 1970s, Kagan went to Hunter College High School, where her mother, Gloria, worked and where her brother Irving now teaches social studies. The school, which was single-sex at the time, is a specialized public school for high-achieving students. She was a "cool smart girl," according to the New York Post and "a standout in a school of ultrabright girls," according to the Times.

Kagan left her hometown for Princeton University, where she wrote a senior thesis on the death of socialism in New York City in the beginning of the 20th century. While at Princeton, she became friends with Eliot Spitzer, who was governor of New York from 2007 to 2008, before resigning in a prostitution scandal.

"She is unbelievably smart and thoughtful and careful -- the sort of perfect qualifications to be a justice of the Supreme Court, somebody who will look at every case, think about the constitutional issues and do what is right for the country," Spitzer said of Kagan this morning on CBS' "The Early Show." "She is not an ideologue of the left or the right."

Kagan currently serves as the country's solicitor general, a post she assumed in 2009 after working as the first female dean of Harvard Law School.