Warren, Elizabeth, 1949- , American politician, b. Oklahoma City, Ok., as Elizabeth Ann Herring, Univ. of Houston (1970, B.S.); Rutgers-Newark Law School (J.D., 1976). Warren’s father suffered a heart attack when she was 12 years old, leading her family to experience financial difficulties; she began working a year later as a waitress. A star debater in high school, she won a scholarship to attend George Washington Univ. when she was 16 years old, but left after two years to marry her first husband, James Robert Warren, in 1968. She moved to Houston with her husband where she completed college with a degree in speech pathology, and then taught schoolchildren with disabilities. When the family relocated to New Jersey, she earned a law degree. The Warrens were divorced in 1978, and two years later she remarried but has kept her first married name for her professional career. Warren taught law at Rutgers-Newark (1977-78); the Univ. of Houston Law Center (1978-83), where she became an associate dean; and the Univ. of Tex. School of Law (1983-87); was a research associate at the Univ. of Tex., Austin (1983-87), and resumed teaching at the Univ. of Pa. Law School (1987-95) and Harvard Law School (1995- ). She is a strong advocate for middle-class families and the financial hurdles that they faced; she was hired by President Barack Obama to serve as an advisor on economic equity, leading to the establishment of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (2011). That same year, she announced her candidacy for the U.S. Senate from Massachusetts; she is currently serving her second term. In 2019, she was among several candidates for the Democratic Nomination for President. Warren is considered a leading voice for progressives in the Senate, along with her colleague Bernie Sanders.
See her The Two Income Trap (with A. Tyagi, 2003, 2016 rev ed.), A Fighting Chance (2014), This Fight Is Our Fight: The Battle to Save America’s Middle Class (2017), Persist (2021).
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