When Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer announced he was stepping down, the pressure was on for President Joe Biden to nominate the first Black woman to the highest court in the U.S.
But Ketanji Brown Jackson broke the mold of Supreme Court jurist in more ways than one: When she was confirmed by the Senate in April 2022, she also became the first public defender to ascend to the court in a generation.
She joined the court’s all-female liberal wing, who are outnumbered in the court’s 6-3 conservative majority. But she immediately garnered attention for her surgically precise questioning of conservative lawyers. In the first eight arguments the court heard, Jackson spoke 11,003 words, more than double that of Elena Kagan or Sonia Sotomayor, according to the Empirical SCOTUS blog.
For the left, Jackson became a symbol of cautious hope at a time when trust in the Supreme Court is at historically low levels, especially among Democrats. Most memorably, she drew praise from court observers for citing the congressional record to Alabama Solicitor General Edmund LaCour Jr., who urged the court in Merrill v. Milligan to adopt a race-blind reading of the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
She made her views abundantly clear — unusually so on a court where justices typically reserve their speechifying for their written opinions.
“I don’t think we can assume that just because race is taken into account that that necessarily creates an equal protection problem,” Jackson said at the time.
“The framers themselves adopted the equal protection clause, the 14th Amendment, the 15th Amendment, in a race-conscious way,” she said, adding that the “entire point” of the 14th Amendment was “to secure rights of the freed former slaves.”
She reprised the role of avid questioner in cases dealing with affirmative action in education, LGBTQ civil rights vs. business owners’ rights, and student debt relief — all cases where the law would have a deep impact on Americans’ daily lives.
