[2] Her mother, Carol Florence Yehle, was an English professor at Jefferson Community College in Watertown, NY.

Her maternal grandfather, Leo J. Yehle, was a family-court judge who helped write the first juvenile justice code in New York in the 1960s.

Upon completing her education, she became a judicial law clerk for Judge J. Sydney Hoffman of the Superior Court of Pennsylvania.

This experience made Scanlon decide to pursue a career in public interest law.

She partnered with the Wills for Heroes Foundation, providing legal documents free of charge to first responders.

She helped a young woman from Guinea who had sickle-cell disease obtain permanent residency.

The district had previously been the 7th, represented by four-term Republican Pat Meehan, who had announced a month earlier that he was not running for reelection.

The seat was one of several that had been significantly redrawn by the Pennsylvania Supreme Court, which ruled that the previous map had been an unconstitutional partisan Republican gerrymander.

Had it existed in 2016, Hillary Clinton would have won it with 63% of the vote, which would have been her third-best performance in the state and her strongest outside of the Philadelphia-based districts.

She was sworn into her 7th district seat on November 13, 2018,[15] in a ceremony attended by Hawa Salih, a Sudanese human rights activist whom Scanlon helped gain asylum in the U.S. She was one of four Democratic women elected to Congress from Pennsylvania in 2018.

[26] Source:[27] According to the Delaware County Daily Times, Scanlon's policy interests "include the need for fair elections; challenges to free speech; access to health care and public education; human rights for the victims of economic and political oppression; gun control; and threats to the environment.

In order to reduce the federal deficit, Scanlon wants to roll back Tax Cuts and Jobs Act.

[30] Scanlon is Roman Catholic and can trace her ancestry back to Ballybunion in County Kerry, Ireland.

The crime took place in South Philadelphia, after Scanlon finished touring Franklin Delano Roosevelt Park that day.