Ketanji Brown Jackson

The 116th justice arrived at the Court trailing two caricatures, both drawn during her confirmation. To her opponents she was a lenient judge produced by a campaign pledge; to her admirers she was a historical destination, the first Black woman on the Supreme Court of the United States, celebrated before she had written a line as a justice. Neither picture survives contact with the record. The record shows a working lawyer of a range no modern colleague can match, the only member of the present Court who has stood beside an indigent client at sentencing, and the fastest-forming judicial voice of any junior justice in the era of measurement. The life that produced that lawyer began in Washington and was made in Miami.

Ketanji Onyika Brown was born in Washington, D.C., on September 14, 1970, to Johnny and Ellery Brown, schoolteachers who had grown up under segregation in Florida and gone from segregated schools to historically Black colleges. An aunt then serving in the Peace Corps in West Africa sent a list of African names; the one her parents chose, they were told, means 'lovely one,' and Justice Jackson would take it for the title of her memoir half a century later. When she was young the family returned to Miami, and her parents rose as the segregated world of their own childhoods receded: her father put himself through the University of Miami's law school and became the chief attorney to the Miami-Dade County School Board, her mother became principal of the New World School of the Arts. Her earliest memory of the law, she has often said, is of sitting at the kitchen table with coloring books while her father sat across from her with his casebooks. The wider family held the whole criminal law in miniature. One uncle, Calvin Ross, rose to chief of the Miami police; another received a life sentence in 1989 for a nonviolent cocaine offense under the mandatory regimes of that era; President Obama commuted the sentence decades later.

At Miami Palmetto Senior High School she was a champion competitive speaker, winner of a national oratory title, and president of her senior class of 1988. She would later credit speech and debate, which carried her to tournaments across the country, as the making of her; the school's practice rooms are as close as her biography comes to the log cabin of the older chapters in this set. At Harvard College she concentrated in government, took up improvisational theater, and helped lead Black Students Association protests after a student hung a Confederate flag from a dormitory window. Her senior thesis examined coercion in plea bargaining, an interest that reads in hindsight as a table of contents. She graduated magna cum laude in 1992, and at Harvard had met Patrick Jackson, a classmate from an old Boston family, bound for surgery; they married in 1996, the year she finished Harvard Law School cum laude after service as a supervising editor of the Harvard Law Review. Two daughters followed.

Three clerkships in four years gave her the standard credential and something more. She clerked for Judge Patti B. Saris of the District of Massachusetts in 1996–97, for the First Circuit's Bruce M. Selya in 1997–98, and, after a year in private practice in Washington, for Justice Stephen Breyer (§108) in October Term 1999. Then, where the standard path runs straight to a partnership or a professorship, hers wandered, and the wandering became the point. She practiced at Goodwin Procter in Boston and at the small Washington firm of Kenneth Feinberg, the mediator the nation would call on to price its catastrophes. From 2003 to 2005 she served as an assistant special counsel to the United States Sentencing Commission. And from 2005 to 2007 she was an assistant federal public defender in the District of Columbia, handling appeals for defendants who could not pay, the first person with that title ever to reach the Supreme Court and the first justice since Thurgood Marshall (§96) to have represented indigent criminal defendants. She then spent three years in appellate practice at Morrison & Foerster before returning to the Sentencing Commission in 2010, this time as vice chair, nominated by President Obama and confirmed in February 2010. In her four years the Commission voted to make its reduced crack-cocaine guidelines retroactive and then, in the 'drugs minus two' amendment, cut the guideline ranges across the drug table and made that retroactive as well, decisions that shortened thousands of federal drug sentences.

President Obama nominated her to the United States District Court for the District of Columbia in September 2012, to the seat Henry H. Kennedy Jr. had vacated; renominated in January 2013, she was confirmed by voice vote that March, with no recorded opposition. Eight years of trial work followed, most of it the anonymous labor of a busy federal district: contracts, agency review, criminal calendars. What made her name was the executive-power docket that landed in her courtroom after 2017. In 2018 she struck down the core of three executive orders curtailing federal employee unions in American Federation of Government Employees v. Trump; in 2019, in Make the Road New York v. McAleenan, she blocked the administration's expansion of fast-track deportations; appeals later undid both rulings. And on November 25, 2019, in Committee on the Judiciary v. McGahn, she ordered the former White House counsel to obey a House subpoena, in an opinion whose central sentence entered the political vocabulary: 'Stated simply, the primary takeaway from the past 250 years of recorded American history is that Presidents are not kings.' Former aides, she continued, 'do not have subjects, bound by loyalty or blood, whose destiny they are entitled to control.' Two years of appellate wrangling followed before McGahn finally testified under an accommodation between the branches, but the sentence had done its work.

President Biden elevated her to the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit in 2021, to the seat Merrick Garland had left to become Attorney General; the Senate confirmed her that June, 53–44, with Republicans Susan Collins, Lindsey Graham, and Lisa Murkowski in support. She had served barely a year when Justice Breyer, her old employer, announced his retirement in January 2022. Biden had promised in the 2020 South Carolina primary campaign to name a Black woman to the Court, and on February 25, 2022, he announced his former clerk's nomination. The choice had a family prehistory: in 2016, after Justice Scalia's death, her daughter Leila, then eleven, had written to President Obama asking him to add 'my mother, Ketanji Brown Jackson of the District Court, to the list,' a judge who 'is determined, honest, and never breaks a promise to anyone, even if there are other things she'd rather do.' Obama chose Merrick Garland instead, and the Senate chose no one; six years later the formal nomination of Leila's candidate went to the Senate on February 28. The March hearings turned less on her rulings than on her sentences: Republicans, led by Senator Josh Hawley, charged that her sentences in child-pornography cases ran below the federal guidelines, an attack that sentencing scholars answered by noting that most district judges' sentences in those cases do. The Judiciary Committee deadlocked eleven to eleven, the full Senate discharged the nomination, and on April 7, 2022, she was confirmed 53–47, with Collins, Murkowski, and Mitt Romney crossing over. At the White House the next day she gave the speech of the season: 'It has taken 232 years and 115 prior appointments for a Black woman to be selected to serve on the Supreme Court of the United States, but we've made it!' She quoted Maya Angelou, 'I am the dream and the hope of the slave,' and offered her family's compression of the American century: 'In my family, it took just one generation to go from segregation to the Supreme Court of the United States.' On June 30, 2022, minutes after Breyer's retirement took effect, she was sworn in as the 116th justice.