“Where she went to school, who she identifies with, her Oklahoma background—Liz is very much one of a kind,” University of Texas law professor Julius B. Getman says, adding that these distinctions may allow her to break the barrier into elective politics.

FIGHTING HER WAY UP

In 2009, when Warren was invited by her students to speak at Harvard Law School’s Class Day, she took the opportunity to state explicitly a message that she said was of utmost importance: Find work that you love. That message is, at least in practice, a defining aspect of Warren’s life, former colleagues say.

“You will spend a huge part of your life working,” Warren said in her speech. “The choices you make about the work you do will be the choices you make about who you are.... The work will shape who you become.”

Warren’s ascent to the ivory tower was long and meandering and began on the lowest rung. The daughter of working class parents, she worked hard through high school and at age 16 earned a scholarship to George Washington University. She took time off from college but eventually graduated from the University of Houston in 1970. She went on to study at Rutgers School of Law-Newark, where she was editor of the law review and found her first teaching position.

From Rutgers she moved to the University of Houston Law Center and then, in 1983, to the University of Texas, where she earned her first full tenured professorship and national clout.

As evidence of her growing reputation, in 1987 the University of Pennsylvania lured Warren and her second husband, fellow Harvard Law School professor Bruce H. Mann, to leave Texas. In 1995, Harvard recruited her from Penn. In less than 20 years, Warren had essentially climbed to the top of the tower. Those who worked with her along the way say she did it largely on her own.

“[W]hat was apparent from the beginning, she was a fighter,” Getman says. “Academics is filled with big and little battles, and it was clear Elizabeth Warren was a fighter.”

“You can tell people who are born to be law professors,” Warren said in a 1993 interview with The Crimson. “They think argument is the highest form of entertainment.”

Warren’s tough beginnings shaped the professor and researcher she is, says Texas law professor Jay L. Westbrook, who has co-authored several books on bankruptcy with Warren.

“I think it has made her an enormously well-rounded human being,” Westbrook says. “Even a lot of professors who are very concerned about the average person, it’s all from a distance, and for Elizabeth Warren it’s not. She really has a powerful sense of being an ordinary person who had opportunities and took them.”

A HARD LOOK AT REALITY

If Warren’s path to the Ivy League is unorthodox, so too has been her research in the fields of bankruptcy and commercial law.

Warren is an empiricist, who places more emphasis on the actual data than economic theory, something former colleagues say is quite rare. Even less common, Warren has made it her mission to make her findings accessible for those outside her cloistered profession.

“Her academic work is distinguished by actually looking at reality,” says Getman, who helped advise Warren’s research at Texas. “She was an empiricist before empiricism was cool, and she was a kind of empiricist who looked into the lives of everyday people.”