Ketanji Brown Jackson’s confirmation to the US supreme court shatters several glass ceilings in America’s long struggle to form a more perfect union.
Not only will she be the first Black woman to sit on the court since it assembled in 1790. She will also be the first justice with experience as a public defender to join a bench that has hosted many former prosecutors.
When Jackson takes her seat on the nine-justice panel, following Stephen Breyer’s retirement probably in June, she will also raise its female contingent to four – a historic number that brings a majority of female justices within reach.
On a more personal level, her promotion to the supreme court is the fulfillment of her ambition to excel at the law which she has nurtured from a young age. It is the realization of the promise given to her by her parents, who were themselves brought up under the ignominies of racial segregation in the US south.
As Jackson said in her opening remarks to the confirmation process: “My parents taught me that, unlike the many barriers that they had had to face growing up, my path was clearer, such that if I worked hard and believed in myself, in America I could do anything or be anything I wanted to be.”
Jackson, 51, was born in Washington DC where her parents, Johnny and Ellery Brown, relocated to escape Jim Crow in the great migration. The family moved back to Miami, Florida, where she spent most of her childhood.
She caught the legal bug from her father who trained to be a lawyer as a mature student when she was at preschool. “He had his stack of law books on the kitchen table while I sat across from him with my stack of coloring books,” she told the Senate judiciary committee.
Jackson imbibed from her parents a pride in her roots. They gave her an African name: “Ketanji Onyika”, meaning “lovely one”.
Born in 1970, Jackson describes herself as a child of the 70s. She was aware that the educational and other opportunities she enjoyed as a member of a burgeoning Black professional class were a product of the civil rights struggles of the 1950s and 60s.
After Miami Palmetto senior high school she studied as an undergraduate at Harvard, followed by Harvard law school. It was at college that she met her husband, a surgeon, Patrick Jackson; they have two daughters, Talia, 21, and Leila, 17.
At her confirmation hearings, Republican senators attempted to depict Jackson as a rabid leftist in hock to socialist groups. The truth is much less dramatic: as an individual and a jurist, she has preferred compromise over conflict, evidential fact over ideology.
“She was always the person trying to find the middle ground,” one of her Harvard roommates, Nina Coleman Simmons, told the Washington Post.
Pressed by Republicans at the confirmation hearings to divulge her “judicial philosophy”, she insisted she had none. Rather, she relied on what she called a “methodology” based on neutrality, the facts in the case and a faithful reading of the law.
Jackson emphasized at the confirmation hearings that her outlook was influenced by her wider family. She has two uncles who were police officers in Miami while her brother, Ketajh, worked for the Baltimore police department before joining the Maryland army national guard.
Jackson did not mention that she had another uncle, Thomas Brown, who was sentenced to life in prison for minor non-violent drug offenses under a brutal three-strikes law. He was released in 2017 after Obama commuted his sentence, but died soon after.
We do not know, given her near silence on the issue, whether Thomas’s plight influenced her decision to work as a federal public defender in Washington. It is notable that during the two years she spent in that role she successfully challenged several cases involving excessively long sentences.
Republicans sought to cast doubt on her sentencing of sex offenders, implying she was sympathetically lenient towards them, but factcheckers have found her approach to have been entirely unremarkable for such cases.
In probably her most famous district court ruling, in 2019 she ordered the former White House counsel Donald McGahn to testify before Robert Mueller’s inquiry into Russian interference. Rejecting Donald Trump’s claim of executive privilege, she stated: “The primary takeaway from the past 250 years of recorded American history is that presidents are not kings.”
Trump was also the subject of one of the few cases she has adjudicated on the federal appellate court in Washington since Joe Biden nominated her last year. In December she ruled for a second time against Trump, finding that the congressional committee investigating the Capitol insurrection on January 6 had a right to see White House records.
Jackson’s arrival on the highest court will not change its six conservative to three liberal-leaning power balance. But given that supreme court justices are appointed for life, she could serve for three decades or more and in so doing help to shape the country’s judicial landscape for at least a generation.
There will be no honeymoon period: she will be flung immediately into some extremely thorny cases in her debut October 2022 term. She has said that she will recuse herself from one of the most politically charged cases on the docket – challenges to affirmative action at Harvard and the University of North Carolina – given her current role with Harvard’s board of overseers.
But there are many more highly contentious cases already piling up, including a dispute over the Clean Water Act relating to wetlands, a look at welfare laws for Native American children, and the question of whether artists, in this case a website designer, can be obliged to do work celebrating gay marriage when it goes against their religious beliefs.
Her initiation to the nation’s highest court is already shaping up to be a blockbuster.
