President-elect Barack Obama has chosen Elena Kagan, dean of Harvard Law School, as his nominee for solicitor general — the administration’s representative before the U.S. Supreme Court

While she has never argued a case before the nation’s high court, Ms. Kagan would be the first female to hold the solicitor-general post full time, according to a report by The American Lawyer.

The solicitor-general position has become a steppingstone to the U.S. Supreme Court: Four former solicitors general have gone on to serve as Supreme Court justices, and a fifth, Robert Bork, was rejected by the Senate, The American Lawyer reports.

Ms. Kagan has been dean at Harvard Law since 2003. Mr. Obama and Ms. Kagan both earned their law degrees at Harvard and both taught at the University of Chicago Law School.

At Harvard, Ms. Kagan is credited with bridging ideological gaps on the faculty, raising funds, reworking the first-year curriculum, and attracting major legal scholars to Harvard, especially Cass R. Sunstein from the University of Chicago and, more recently, Lawrence Lessig from the Stanford University Law School.

The Harvard Crimson, the campus newspaper, said Ms. Kagan would resign her deanship and take a leave of absence from the faculty to serve in the administration. —Eric Kelderman