Meet the nominee: Merrick Garland was formally named by President Obama today as the Supreme Court nominee
Merrick Garland has been nominated for the Supreme Court vacancy created by the death of Antonin Scalia
He used Rose Garden speech beside president to hail his wife Lynn and daughters Rebecca and Jessica
Story after the cut ....
Garland is from Lincolnwood, IL, and studied at Harvard, while his wife is scion of liberal judicial family who herself attended Harvard
Her grandfather was aide and speechwriter to FDR and part of circle of advisers credited with concept of first New Deal
Garlands sent their daughters to Sidwell Friends, elite $37,750-a-year Washington DC school where Malia and Sasha Obama currently study ...His wife was a teacher there in 2003 and the couple have donated to the school
Merrick Garland has been nominated for the Supreme Court vacancy created by the death of Antonin Scalia
He used Rose Garden speech beside president to hail his wife Lynn and daughters Rebecca and Jessica
Story after the cut ....
Garland is from Lincolnwood, IL, and studied at Harvard, while his wife is scion of liberal judicial family who herself attended Harvard
Her grandfather was aide and speechwriter to FDR and part of circle of advisers credited with concept of first New Deal
Garlands sent their daughters to Sidwell Friends, elite $37,750-a-year Washington DC school where Malia and Sasha Obama currently study ...His wife was a teacher there in 2003 and the couple have donated to the school
If President Obama was looking for the ultimate judicial insider, he need not have looked much further than Merrick Garland.
A Harvard and Harvard Law graduate, he met his first president in 1970, when as a National Merit Scholar, he was greeted by President Nixon.
Later he clerked for a Supreme Court justice, prosecuted some of the most notorious crimes of recent decades, and is now the most senior appeal court judge on the city's federal circuit.
But it is not just Garland himself who is a power player in Washington DC.
Family pride: Lynn Garland, the judge's wife (right), a physicist and teacher, and his daughter Jessica, 23, watched as he was named by the president for the vacant seat. His chances of gaining at slim to none
His wife, Lynn Rosenman, is the granddaughter of a liberal judge and aide to Presidents Franklin D Roosevelt and Truman, and has been heavily involved in the social life of one of the city's most elite schools, Sidwell Friends.
And his daughters, both graduates of Sidwell Friends, where the Obamas' daughters are currently studying and where Chelsea Clinton graduated, both went on to Yale and at least one seems to show some interest in following in her father's footsteps.
Brilliant student: Garland graduated Niles West High School as valedictorian and was also a National Merit Scholar and Presidential Scholar
Wedding: Garland married Lynn Rosenman in a religious ceremony at the Harvard Club in New York
Family: The Garlands have two children, Rebecca (left) now 25 and Jessica (right) now 23. Both graduated from Yale
Garland was brought up by conservative Jewish parents in the Chicago suburbs and spoke proudly in the Rose Garden of how the Russian pogroms had brought his grandparents to America early in the last century 'fleeing anti-Semitism and hoping to make a better life for their children'.
His father, Cyril, ran an advertising agency from the basement of their home, where Merrick was brought up with his two younger sisters, Jill and Heidi.
He passed away in 2000, while his mother Shirley is still alive in Lincolnwood, Cook County, Illinois, where the judge said today she would be watching his formal naming as nominee by the president, 'crying'.
It was their son, born in 1952, for whom the American dream was truly achieved.
A brilliant student at school, he was both a National Merit Scholar and Presidential Scholar, and in June 1970 met Nixon.
He went on to Harvard, graduating summa cum laude - with the highest honors - in 1974 as valedictorian, then went to Harvard Law School where he graduated magna cum laude.
While there he edited the Harvard Law Review, an almost-guarantee of reaching the highest offices - its editor in 1990 was Barack Obama.
It was also at Harvard that there he met his wife, Lynn Rosenman.
Her connections are impeccable: her grandfather Samuel Rosenman was one of the 'brain trust', the circle of advisers with whom Franklin D Roosevelt surrounded himself as he took office in 1933.
Rosenman, Texas-born to a Russian-Jewish family, had been Roosevelt's legal counsel when he was governor of New York, and was his principal speechwriter until his death.
At least one book - Carol Gelderman's The Bully Pulpit and the Creation of the Presidency - credits Rosenman with introducing the words 'New Deal' in 1932, when Roosevelt spoke to accept the Democratic nomination.
Precious: The judge spoke of his daughters as 'spectacular' and said they were better at sports than him
Elite education: Both the Garland daughters went to Sidwell Friends in Washington DC
Proud: Garland said the nomination was the highest honor it was possible to imagine
Photo: Franklin and Eleanor roosevelt Institute
Key adviser: Samuel Rosenman, the judge's wife grandfather, was FDR's principal speechwriter and has been credited with the first use of the phrase 'New Deal'. He was also a distinguished judge
Key adviser: Samuel Rosenman, the judge's wife grandfather, was FDR's principal speechwriter and has been credited with the first use of the phrase 'New Deal'. He was also a distinguished judge
He was to go on to become an adviser to President Truman, write one of the key works of FDR's own writings, and his name continues to be carried by Katten Muchin Rosenman, the successor to the law firm Rosenman & Colin.
His wife was a distinguished student herself, a candidate for class marshal at Harvard in 1982.
She was educated at Brearley, an exclusive all-girls private school in Manhattan's Upper East Side where Caroline Kennedy was also a student.
A physicist who was working on her PhD when they met at a rehearsal dinner, the couple married in 1987 in a Jewish ceremony at the Harvard Club in New York, an event recorded in the pages of the New York Times in recognition of the couple's social status.
'She is the most honest, straightforward person you can imagine,' he said in a White House video released today.
Garland's career after Harvard saw him clerk for Associate Justice William J. Brennan Jr. at the Supreme Court, and also go on to prosecute a series of significant cases.
Among them were Timothy McVeigh, sentenced to death after a federal trial for the Oklahoma bombing, while he also oversaw the investigation into 'Unabomber' Theodore Kaczynski.
The Garlands now live in Bethesda, the upscale suburb of Washington DC, where they live in a $2.1 million home.
Understood to be culturally not religiously Jewish - according to a former clerk who is now columnist with the Forward newspaper - they sent Rebecca, now 25, and Jessica, 23 - who was in the Rose Garden today - to Sidwell Friends.
He paid tribute to them today, saying: 'We have two spectacular daughters who are very much like her, very athletic, very smart at math and science. They are better at practically all sports than I am.'
On the bench: Garland's daughters and his wife were present as he became a judge for the first time
Atheltic: 'We have two spectacular daughters who are very much like her, very athletic, very smart at math and science. They are better at practically all sports than I am,' the judge said
Graduation: Jessica, 23, followed in her sister's steps when she graduated first from Sidwell Friends and then from Yale. She was there to see her father being named as the nominee by the president
Arguably Washington's best-connected school, it is currently where President Obama and his wife send their daughters and in 2003, Lynn Garland was on the staff, according to a financial disclosure form signed by her husband.
It is unclear if she still is, but the couple have been generous benefactors over the year to a school which currently charges $37,500 a year in annual fees for middle and upper-school students.
The Garlands are listed as donating up to $4,999 in 2006, while in 2008 Mrs Garland hosted tea with a children's author as part of a silent auction fundraiser.
Garland’s daughters have followed their parents to Ivy League - although both have gone to Yale for their first degrees.
Jessica studied ethics, politics and economics whilst Rebecca studied psychology.
Whilst at college Jessica was the co-president of the student-run social justice group the Yale Undergraduate Prison Project which looked into issues of mass incarceration.
According to her LinkedIn page she also worked as an intern at nonprofit the Vera Institute of Justice is now a graduate student at Cambridge University in the UK.
Her interests suggest she mat follow her father's footsteps into law. And her sister Rebecca went on to Harvard, and she has stayed in the city, working for the Community Learning Center in Cambridge, MA, teaching adults English.
She now works for Trinity Partners, a consultant to the bio-technology sector based in Cambridge.
The Garlands now have the possibility of one of the greatest honors of all in the form of a Supreme Court seat, although it is at best a slim chance - but regardless of that they will remain formidably well-connected
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