Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson is President Joe Biden’s nominee for the Supreme Court seat soon to be vacated by Justice Stephen Breyer.
If confirmed, the fifty-one year-old – a former public defender – will be the first Black woman to serve on the nation’s most powerful court.
Jackson currently sits on DC’s federal appellate bench. After graduating from Harvard Law School, she clerked for Breyer, who called her “great, brilliant, decent, with a mix of common sense and thoughtfulness.”
As a public defender, Jackson represented men indefinitely detained without charges at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.
Jackson later spent several years in private practice. Former President Barack Obama appointed her to the federal district court in DC and she served on his US Sentencing Commission, where she helped reduce the recommended penalties for nonviolent drug offenders.
When Biden elevated Jackson to the influential U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit last year, she received the support of three Republican lawmakers – Senators Lisa Murkowski (Alaska), Susan Collins (Maine) and Lindsey O. Graham (S.C.).
NBC News adds:
As a judge, Jackson has no record of rulings, writings or speeches on the hot-button issues of abortion, gun rights or freedom of religion. She was on the three-judge appeals court panel that rejected former President Donald Trump’s effort to block the National Archives from giving the House Jan. 6 committee hundreds of documents from his time in the White House.
In her most notable ruling as a trial judge, Jackson said former Trump White House counsel Don McGahn was required to testify before the House Judiciary Committee.
“The primary takeaway from the past 250 years of recorded American history is that presidents are not kings,” she said in a widely quoted line from her decision.
Her ruling was overturned, however, by the appeals court on procedural grounds.
Jackson grew up in Miami. Her mother was a school administration and her father was an attorney for the Miami-Dade school board. Two of her uncles worked in law enforcement and her brother, an Army veteran, served in Iraq.
“A high school debate champion and class president, Jackson earned her undergraduate and law degrees from Harvard, where she met her future husband Patrick Jackson, a surgeon,” The Washington Post reports.
CNN adds:
Eyes will now turn to the Senate, where Biden’s Democratic Party holds the thinnest possible majority. The President will hope that Jackson can garner bipartisan support, but Democrats will need all their members in Washington to ensure her confirmation. Unlike for most major pieces of legislation, Democrats do not need Republican help to confirm a Supreme Court justice and can do it with their 50 votes and Vice President Kamala Harris breaking a deadlock.