With the end of the Supreme Court’s 2022 term, what have we learned about the most junior justice? To some, Ketanji Brown Jackson has been a reliable vote for the liberal coalition; others contend that she’s a swing vote with a tendency to surprise her fans by joining the court’s conservatives.
In truth, one year is too short a time to reach a reliable conclusion; the sample size is too small. Still, on the evidence so far, I’m struck by a quite different thought — that she might prove a worthy successor to the first Justice Jackson. That would be Robert H., the Nuremberg prosecutor, perhaps the most influential member of the court in the middle years of the 20th century, who was lauded in particular for his close and careful reading of statutes. That fascination with the details of the law might be the most overlooked aspect of her first term.
Just consider how Jackson writes. She has mostly resisted the habit, unhappily common on the current court, of penning opinions with an apparent eye to quotation in the press. Instead, she writes ... well, like a lawyer: “It soon became clear that our primary and secondary escheatment rules were resulting in inequitable distributions, at least with respect to particular instruments.” Try posting that on social media and see how often it’s retweeted.
