Should she be confirmed as the 116th justice for the US Supreme Court, Ketanji Brown Jackson will be the first to have ever defended people in court who were too poor to pay for their defence.
Judge Jackson – who will be the first-ever Black woman on the high court, if confirmed – is also the first nominee with significant criminal defence experience since Thurgood Marshall, a powerful civil rights attorney whose legal arguments dismantled segregation and sought an end to legalised discrimination, work that had a lasting influence on his decision-making as the nation’s first Black Supreme Court justice.
