After the sudden death of Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia in 2016, Barack Obama had a decision to make. He wanted to replace the conservative Scalia with a liberal judge who could tilt the court back to the left. But he also needed someone who would have a chance of being confirmed by a Republican-led Senate.
Eleven-year-old Leila Jackson knew who Obama should pick: Her mother, Ketanji Brown Jackson, a district court judge.
Jackson penned a handwritten letter to the White House, beginning with, “Dear Mr. President.” Leila said her mother would “be an excellent fit for the position. She is determined, honest, and never breaks a promise to anyone, even if there are other things she’d rather do.”
Leila also noted her mother’s commitment, loyalty, and the fact that she “never brags.” She ended her letter with one final appeal, “I think she would make a great Supreme Court Justice, even if the workload will be larger on the court, or you have other nominees.”
Obama did not choose Jackson for the seat, instead picking Merrick Garland. The Senate refused to even consider his nomination, saying, “It’s an election year.” When Trump took office, he appointed Neil Gorsuch to the open seat.
But six years after Leila wrote the letter, President Joe Biden had the chance to pick a new justice, and he picked Jackson. She became the first Black woman to serve on the nation’s highest court, propelled there by her years as a public defender and her time clerking for the man whose seat she ultimately took.
Welcome to our series on the nine Supreme Court Justices. This week is focused on Ketanji Brown Jackson, and is our final piece of the series.
Ketanji Brown was born in Washington, DC, and raised in Miami, where both her parents worked as public school teachers. Jackson’s mother, Ellery, wanted to see if she could teach Jackson to read by age two, so she labeled everything in the little girl’s room with the alphabet and word cards. Her parents limited her TV time and signed her up for piano lessons, theater, and swimming.
Jackson says her parents instilled three core values in her: “Hard work, a belief in the vastness of individual potential, and fierce pride in the journey and legacy of Black Americans.” Her parents picked her name, Ketanji Onyika, after asking an aunt who was in the Peace Corps in Africa to send them a list of African girls’ names. It means “Lovely One.”
She grew up in a house surrounded by “the art, fabrics, and memorabilia” that her parents had gathered on a trip to Africa, as well as “books and images that reflected our Black American experience, both the good and the bad.”
They also made sure she knew she could do anything she wanted. If Ketanji ever questioned her ability, Ellery would ask her, “Have you seen other people do it?” If the answer was yes, her mother would say, “Well, if it is possible for a person to do this thing, then you can do it, too.”
When Jackson was young, her father, Johnny, left teaching to attend the University of Miami’s law school, and he involved his young daughter in his course load. She said he would sometimes, “look up from his textbooks to talk to me about his cases, to ask me what I thought, as if I weren’t four years old. The conundrums he described fascinated me; they were stories of people in trouble, conflict or sorrow, seeking the even-handed recourse of the law.”
From a very young age, Jackson knew she wanted to study law like her father and she “dreamed of helping to resolve people’s problems.”
To achieve this dream, she became fiercely competitive. She was one of the few Black children put into gifted classes at school, and she started public speaking, debate, and creative writing at an early age. In middle school, Jackson found inspiration in Constance Baker Motley (who happened to share her birthday, September 14), the first Black female federal judge. Motley became Jackson’s “personal heroine and forever role model.”
In high school, Jackson went on to become the class president, and is quoted in her senior yearbook saying, "I want to go into law and eventually have a judicial appointment." Jackson even skipped her high school graduation to compete in a speech and debate competition — which she won. At the time, her father told her, “You will have other graduations.”
And she did. Jackson got into Harvard early, along with three other students from her class. When the principal announced the news over the intercom, the other students cheered. A classmate later told her, “We were all so happy for you. Nobody was jealous or resentful, and absolutely nobody was surprised by your achievement—because you are Ketanji!”
At Harvard, Jackson thrived, especially in a class called, “Justice,” which examined how “classical theories of ethics and justice applied to issues of the moment.” She later wrote in her memoir, “I felt myself expanding and growing more visible to myself as I engaged the great philosophical conundrums. The animated discussions about open-ended ethical dilemmas made me come completely alive.”
While taking a class about race in America, Jackson met a young man named Patrick Jackson, and they soon tumbled into a love affair. Ketanji was nervous that Patrick’s wealthy family would rescind their offer to pay for his medical school if they found out he was dating a Black woman.
"I was just nervous about the whole scenario,” she said. “My parents had grown up in the South and segregation and, you know, this was an interracial relationship, which was unusual.” Patrick didn’t care what his parents might think.
He told her, “Even if I have to take a job or do something else, I choose you.”
Jackson completed her undergraduate studies and rolled straight into Harvard Law. She both graduated from law school and married Patrick in one consequential year: 1996. The couple went on to have two daughters, Leila and Talia.
Her work in law school was noteworthy, and Jackson knew that if she ever wanted to be a judge, the best way to learn the ropes was with clerkships. She completed two federal clerking positions, before Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer called, offering her a position she had applied for just a few days earlier. Jackson was stunned, saying that Breyer “plucked her from obscurity.”
Justice Breyer joined the court in 1994 after being nominated by President Bill Clinton. As one of the court’s liberal justices, Breyer was known for his pragmatic approach to the law that focused on the real life consequences of the court’s rulings. This view of the law made a lasting impression on Jackson, who has said she “learned a lot about constitutional philosophy, and ways of interpreting statutes and the constitution” from Breyer. During an interview years later, Jackson said, “Justice Breyer…looks at not only what the words say, but what these words were supposed to be accomplishing in the light of what this statute is doing. It's more of a contextual analysis.”
Jackson also says she learned about the direct impact the law had on people in part due to her brother’s time as a police officer in Baltimore and later as a National Guardsmen, her uncle’s tenure as police chief in Miami, and her other uncle’s service as a sex crimes detective in Miami-Dade County.
But she built her own experience while working as a public defender in 2005. She served in this role for two years in Washington, DC, and handled appeals for those convicted of a federal crime but could not afford counsel.
A.J. Kramer, who assigned Jackson’s cases, said, “Being a public defender and working from within the system gives someone a full grasp of how the criminal justice system works because you get to see the people involved on both sides, from the prosecutor’s perspective and the client’s. You really get to see that clients are human beings.”
The case she considered career-defining was that of a Guantanamo Bay detainee named Khi Ali Gul. Before Jackson was assigned to the case, the Supreme Court ruled that detainees at the prison could challenge their detainment in federal court.
In a brief filed in the case, Jackson argued that Gul was wrongfully classified as an “enemy combatant” by the US and was being held “virtually incommunicado in military custody.” She claimed his detention was “without lawful basis, without charge, and without access to counsel or any fair process by which he might challenge his detention.” All this was in violation of US and international law, Jackson argued.
Gul’s case was not finished before Jackson left her time as a public defender. It was later consolidated with other cases, and Gul was eventually sent back to Afghanistan in 2015 after an executive order from Obama.
But the case stuck with Jackson, and she later wrote several briefs arguing on behalf of Guantanamo detainees. Jackson later said of her time as a public defender, “I lacked a practical understanding of the actual workings of the federal criminal justice system, and I decided that serving ‘in the trenches,’ so to speak, would be helpful.”
She then served as the Vice Chair and Commissioner on the US Sentencing Commission, a bipartisan and independent agency that works on sentencing guidelines and policies for federal courts. She was nominated by Obama, in part due her time as a public defender.
Her mentor, Justice Breyer, had previously served on the commission in the 90s. While on the commission from 2010 to 2014, Jackson helped rewrite the guidelines to lower the recommended penalties for drug-related offenses. During this time, she was nominated by Obama to the United States District Court for the District of Columbia, and went on to serve more than eight years as a judge.
She had bipartisan support, with former Republican House speaker Paul Ryan (who Jackson is related to by marriage), saying, “Our politics may differ, but my praise for Ketanji’s intellect, for her character, for her integrity, it is unequivocal. She’s an amazing person, and I favorably recommend her consideration.”
Jackson’s most famous case as a trial judge was in 2019, when she ordered White House Counsel Don McGahn to appear before Congress during Donald Trump’s first impeachment trial. Trump tried to argue that he is “absolutely immune” from speaking to the House Judiciary Committee, and that the immunity extended to his inner circle. Jackson called absolute immunity “a fiction” and wrote, “Stated simply, the primary takeaway from the past 250 years of recorded American history is that Presidents are not kings.”
After nearly a decade as a trial judge, President Biden nominated her to the US Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit in 2021. And just a year later, Breyer announced his retirement. Biden was drawn to Jackson’s time as a public defender.
As a senator, Biden was the chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, and as such, had spent a lot of time thinking about and helping to shape the judicial system. He knew the type of justice he wanted to pick, and considered choosing a Supreme Court nominee one of the most important duties of his presidency.
Biden nominated Jackson on February 25, 2022. Though she had been through the Senate confirmation process multiple times before when getting on the Commission, district court, and appeals court, this process was harder. Republican senators didn’t like that she was supported by liberals, and questioned her about her time representing a Guantanamo Bay detainee.
The biggest confrontation took place when Tennessee Sen. Marsha Blackburn began asking Jackson about a case involving admissions at the Virginia Military Institute. Blackburn asked Jackson to provide a definition of the word “woman.”
Jackson said, “Can I provide a definition? No, I can’t.”
Blackburn responded, “You can’t?”
“Not in this context. I am not a biologist,” replied Jackson.
“So you believe the meaning of the word woman is so unclear and controversial that you can’t give me a definition?” Blackburn questioned.
“Senator, in my work as a judge, what I do is I address disputes, if there’s a dispute about a definition, people make arguments, and I look at the law and I decide,” Jackson said.
Blackburn said, “Well, the fact that you can’t give me a straight answer about something as fundamental as what a woman is underscores the dangers of the kind of progressive education that we are hearing about.” Blackburn went on to talk about Lia Thompson, a transgender woman and swimmer at the University of Pennsylvania who competed as a woman in the NCAA championships. Blackburn asked what message Thomas competing sends to girls who want to be athletes.
Jackson responded, “Senator, I am not sure what message that sends. If you're asking me about the legal issues related to it, those are topics that are being hotly discussed, as you say, and could come to the court.”
Blackburn said, “I think it tells our girls that their voices don’t matter, I think it tells them that they’re second-class citizens, and parents want to have a Supreme Court justice who is committed to preserving parental autonomy and protecting our nation’s children."
During the confirmation hearings, Jackson’s daughter Leila sat proudly behind her mom, beaming with admiration.
In the end, Jackson’s experience working within the criminal justice system, her work as a public defender, and her time as a judge won out, and Jackson was confirmed by a 53 to 47 vote on April 7, 2022. She was sworn in on June 30, 2022, becoming the first Black woman Supreme Court Justice. She also became the first public defender to take the bench. The last justice with similar experience representing criminal defendants was Justice Thurgood Marshall, who retired in 1991.
Jackson immediately found her voice on the court, issuing three solo dissents in her first term. (Chief Justice John Roberts did write a solo dissent for his first 16 years on the court). She has voted to uphold voting rights and affirmative action and voted against presidential immunity, most often joining with her liberal colleagues.
In every office Jackson has occupied, including the one at the Supreme Court, she’s kept a copy of the Henry Wadsworth Longfellow poem, “The Ladder of Saint Augustine.” She says this passage is particularly meaningful to her:
“The heights by great men reached and kept
Were not attained by sudden flight,
But they, while their companions slept,
Were toiling upward in the night.”
"I love the idea that in order to be successful, it takes hard work,” Jackson said. “You can't always control whether you're the smartest person in the room, for example, but you [can] commit to being the hardest worker."