How Liberal Is Ketanji Brown Jackson?

Her bloc has two other members, so the test is simple: a divided case in which Sotomayor and Kagan voted together and Jackson voted the other way. That happened in 11 of the 84 such cases in the 2022 through 2024 terms — 13.1%, about one case in eight, a rate well under Thomas’s 22.4% from his bloc.

Which direction? The database codes 6 of the 11 breaks conservative and 5 liberal — but here its coding earns the caveat the methodology page gives it: it records her vote in Fischer, for the January 6 defendant, as a conservative vote. The legible signal is who she landed with: four breaks put her to the left of her own seatmates — twice alone, twice with only Gorsuch — and the other seven took her rightward,5 of them into a conservative-anchored majority reading a statute’s text, two into dissents beside Alito and Kavanaugh.

Both of her career solo dissents are labor cases, and in both she stood alone defending the National Labor Relations Board’s turf — past Sotomayor and Kagan. In Glacier Northwest she was the only justice who would have held a company’s tort suit against striking drivers for the Board that Congress built; in Starbucks v. McKinney she alone objected that courts weighing the Board’s injunctions should not re-decide merits Congress assigned to the agency. The other leftward breaks came with a single companion — Gorsuch — in Bufkin, reading the veterans’ benefit-of-the-doubt statute to demand real review, and Delligatti, refusing to call a crime of omission a “crime of violence.”

The breaks that read as rightward are statutory-interpretation cases, and in most of them she wrote separately to say exactly why. In Fischer she joined the majority narrowing the obstruction statute used against January 6 defendants — over a dissent by Barrett, Sotomayor and Kagan — and her concurrence made the principle explicit: however shocking the day, courts apply the statute Congress actually wrote. In Bittner she was the only justice to join the rule-of-lenity section of Gorsuch’s taxpayer-favoring majority. In Purdue Pharma she joined Gorsuch, Thomas, Alito and Barrett to hold the Bankruptcy Code gives no power to wipe out claims against the Sacklers. And in Erlinger she startled court-watchers: the former public defender wrote that Apprendi — the modern cornerstone of jury rights at sentencing — “was wrongly decided,” a view she traced to her years on the Sentencing Commission and the worry that the rule “might also be inhibiting our collective achievement of a fairer sentencing system.”

Thomas breaks by dissenting — 25 of his 28. Jackson does not: of her 11 breaks, 6 were dissents and 5 put her in the majority, three of those with a concurrence explaining her own route to it. That is the shape of her whole record so far. Of 178 recorded votes, 37 came with a separate concurrence — she writes to explain, not only to object. In the 2023 term she tied Thomas, three decades her senior in service, for the most opinions of any justice, and she has spoken more words at oral argument than any colleague in each of her terms.

The method is the one she named at her confirmation, when she declined the usual labels: “I have developed a methodology that I use in order to ensure that I’m ruling impartially and that I am adhering to the limits on my judicial authority.” Three terms of votes read like a justice applying a method rather than a program: left of her seatmates on labor, beside Gorsuch on lenity and the elements clause, beside the Chief Justice on the pork producers’ day in court.