Sen. Elizabeth Warren Labor Day Message

Senator Elizabeth Warren





Elizabeth Warren Born in Oklahoma City in 1949, Elizabeth Warren became the first member of her family to graduate from college, eventually earning her law degree from Rutgers University. After working as a law professor at Harvard University, Warren was selected to lead the National Bankruptcy Review Commission. In 2008, she headed the Congressional Oversight Panel for the Troubled Asset Relief Program. Four years later, in November 2012, Warren won election to the U.S. Senate, By 1978, she had divorced her first husband. In the year after the split, Warren began exploring the economic pressures facing the American middle class, looking specifically at a 1978 law passed by Congress that made it easier for companies and individuals to declare bankruptcy. Warren decided to investigate the reasons why Americans were ending up in bankruptcy court, and discovered that most of the financial victims were from middle-class families who had lost jobs, experienced financial hardship from a divorce, or suffered illnesses that decimated their savings. From then on, Warren would focus her research on bankruptcy and commercial law—specifically on how it affected financially distressed companies and women, the elderly and the working poor. Warren married Harvard law professor Bruce Mann in 1980. She and Mann then moved together around the country, with Warren teaching at the University of Texas, the University of Michigan, and the University of Pennsylvania.