Kagan reports assets of $1.76 million, no debts

Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan says she has $1.76 million in assets — mostly in bank accounts and retirement funds — and no debts or liabilities, according to her financial statement released Tuesday by the Senate Judiciary Committee.

Kagan sent nearly 200 pages of material to the committee in response to its standard questionnaire. She included dozens of articles she wrote for the Princeton school newspaper, a detailed list of her speaking engagements and copies of academic articles she wrote over the last two decades.

Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick J. Leahy (D-Vt.) praised Kagan for submitting her answers just eight days after her nomination. He said the committee expected to receive thousands of pages of files from the Clinton Presidential Library in Arkansas that document her time as a lawyer and domestic policy advisor to President Clinton.

These files “put us well down the road toward our preparation for her confirmation hearing,” Leahy said. “I intend to announce the schedule for her confirmation hearing soon.”

Kagan, who would replace retiring Justice John Paul Stevens, has spent most of her career in government or academia. She earned $437,299 a year as dean of Harvard Law School, a position she held from 2003 to 2009. She also reported having been paid a $10,000 stipend to serve on the advisory council for Goldman Sachs, the Wall Street firm that became enmeshed in the subprime market crisis, from March 2005 to December 2008.

Last October, Kagan sold a condominium in Cambridge, Mass., for $1.53 million. She had purchased the unit for $1.4 million in 2004, according to the registry of deeds office in Massachusetts. At that time, she borrowed $760,000 from Countrywide Home Loans and apparently paid the balance — $640,000 — in cash.

In recent years, several justices of the Supreme Court have stepped aside from deciding cases because they owned stock in one of the companies affected by the outcome. Kagan’s statement says she has no money in stocks, real estate, autos or other property, and she has no loans or mortgages.

She lists $198,532 in “U.S. government securities” and $739,783 in “cash on hand and in banks.” Her one other asset is $824,204 in a retirement fund.

Under liabilities and debts, she put down “0.”

david.savage@latimes.com

Richard A. Serrano in the Washington bureau contributed to this report.