Ketanji Brown Jackson, associate justice of the Supreme Court, was welcomed with a standing ovation as she appeared virtually at Fortune’s Most Powerful Women summit in Laguna Niguel, Calif., on Tuesday. After all, she’s the first Black woman to sit on the country’s highest court. Jackson gave us details on everything from her recently released memoir, Lovely One (and whether she’s in for a film adaptation: The answer is she’s open to it, but she won’t say who she wants to play her), to her historical appointment, to memories of her father.
When she was about 3 years old, her father decided he wanted to be a lawyer, not a high school history teacher, as he had been. They moved to Miami, where he attended law school, and Jackson recalls him sitting across from her at the kitchen table in their campus apartment. “He had all of his law books on the table, and I had my coloring book on the table,” she said. Jackson thought maybe that was something she could do. And it helped that she was being raised in a different era.
