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Reason
Reason
Politics
Jonathan H. Adler

Book: Judge Jackson Said She "Do[esn't] Understand" Justice Thomas

Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit is one of the leading contenders to replace Justice Stephen Breyer on the Supreme Court. As ABC News reports, Judge Jackson apparently shared some candid views on one of her potential future colleagues in an interview for the book Supreme Discomfort: The Divided Soul of Clarence Thomas, by Kevin Merida and Michael Fletcher.

From the ABC News report:

More than two decades before becoming a top contender to be President Joe Biden's Supreme Court nominee, a young Ketanji Brown Jackson sat across from Justice Clarence Thomas, reportedly perplexed by how someone of his background -- not so different from her own -- could have developed such a conservative bent.

"I don't understand you,'" Jackson, who clerked for Justice Stephen Breyer from 1999 to 2000, remembered thinking, according to a 2007 biography of Thomas, "Supreme Discomfort: The Divided Soul of Clarence Thomas."

"'You sound like my parents. You sound like the people I grew up with.' But the lessons he tended to draw from the experiences of the segregated South seemed to be different than those of everybody I know," the book, by authors Kevin Merida and Michael Fletcher, said Jackson thought as she and Thomas shared lunch.

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