WASHINGTON (CNS) — Solicitor General Elena Kagan, the nominee to replace Justice John Paul Stevens on the Supreme Court, probably will face Senate confirmation hearings in late June. Kagan, 50, would be the fourth woman to sit on the court and the first justice in 38 years to reach it without first serving as a judge.

She would become the third Jewish member of the court; the other six are Catholics.

With no judicial record, Kagan will be screened on the basis of her work as solicitor general — a post she has held for a little more than a year — and for her long academic record as dean of Harvard Law School and a professor there and at the University of Chicago. She also served in the Clinton administration as associate White House counsel, assistant to the president for domestic policy and deputy director of the Domestic Policy Council. She also spent some time in private law practice.

President Barack Obama introduced a beaming Kagan as his nominee May 10 at a brief event at the White House. He called her one of the nation’s foremost legal minds. Obama’s and Kagan’s stints on the faculty of the University of Chicago Law School in the 1990s overlapped.

“Elena is respected and admired not just for her intellect and record of achievement,” Obama said, “but also for her temperament, her openness to a broad array of viewpoints, her habit, to borrow a phrase from Justice Stevens, of understanding before disagreeing, her fair-mindedness and skill as a consensus-builder.”