Each week on The Term, Supreme Court reporter Jimmy Hoover and co-host Natalie Rodriguez break down all the high court action. On Wednesday's special episode, the hosts pore through an archive of speeches, panels and hearings to explore how D.C. Circuit Judge Jackson became the first African American woman nominated to the Supreme Court. Read on for highlights.
'A Professional Odyssey Of Epic Proportions'
Judge Jackson's road to Friday's Supreme Court nomination was a long and winding one or, as she described it in a 2017 speech, "a professional odyssey of epic proportions."
Born Ketanji Onyika Brown in Washington, D.C., in 1970 to two public school teachers, she was raised in the suburbs of Miami. At the White House on Friday, she spoke about the influence of watching her father studying for law school before he became a lawyer for the Miami-Dade County board of education.
"Some of my earliest memories are of him sitting at the kitchen table, reading his law books. I watched him study, and he became my first professional role model," she said.
Attending Miami Palmetto High School — which, in Jeff Bezos, counts one of the richest people on earth among its alumni — Judge Jackson became class president and developed her rhetorical skills on the speech and debate team, winning a national championship in original oratory.
"That was an experience that I can say without hesitation was the one activity that best prepared me for law and for life," she said in 2017. "I gained the self-confidence that can sometimes be difficult for women and minorities to develop at an early age."
It was while traveling with her debate team that she first visited the Harvard campus and saw where she wanted to go to college. Despite her guidance counselor reportedly telling her "not to set her sights so high," she was accepted and went on to graduate magna cum laude.
"It was unquestionably the right place for me. I had fabulous friends, took challenging courses and participated in a wide range of interesting extracurricular activities, including drama and musical theater, during which I made several notable connections, the most prominent of which I suppose is Matt Damon, who was assigned to be my scene partner during a drama course we took one semester. As a side note, although I was pretty good, I doubt he'd remember me now."
Judge Jackson did more than share the stage with Jason Bourne during her college years. Her senior thesis at Harvard, "The Hand of Oppression': Plea Bargaining Processes and the Coercion of Criminal Defendants," revealed a strong gravitation to the law.
After a short stint at Time magazine following graduation, she attended law school at Harvard, where she graduated cum laude and was an editor of the Harvard Law Review. She spent her first years as a lawyer clerking, eventually winning a prestigious spot working for Associate Justice Stephen Breyer.
She next moved to Boston with her husband, Patrick, who was completing his residency in surgery. She joined Goodwin & Procter as an associate, but three months pregnant at the time, she soon found it difficult to balance work in BigLaw with her family life.
"The hours are long. The workflow is unpredictable. You have little control over your time and your schedule, and you start to feel as though the demands of the billable hour are constantly in conflict with the needs of your children and your family responsibilities."
The next decade would bring a whirlwind of career moves from Judge Jackson that ultimately led to her nomination to the federal district court bench in Washington. She left Goodwin for a job in D.C. at another firm, The Feinberg Group, before joining the U.S. Sentencing Commission as a staff attorney. After that, she developed her appellate advocacy skills as a federal public defender in Washington D.C., arguing around 10 appeals in the D.C. Circuit. And then for "financial reasons," as she later explained, she left the government and was of counsel at Morrison & Foerster LLP.
And then after an appointment from President Barack Obama, she served as vice chair of the U.S. Sentencing Commission from 2010 to 2014.
"As anyone who knows me can tell you, there were a number of years in which I literally moved from job to job to job. I guess you could say I was something of a professional vagabond, moving from place to place as my family needs and circumstances changed."
In September 2012, she was nominated as a replacement for retiring U.S. District Judge Henry Kennedy Jr. and confirmed the following March. Jackson later recalled being thrust into the deep end with cases.
"When I got to the court, I ran into one of the clerks, who said, 'Oh, you must be the new judge. Do you know that there are 150 cases already lined up for you?' And I said, 'What?' And so I ended up actually coming on quicker than I intended because things were happening in my cases that were not being attended to."
Over her eight-and-a-half years on the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, Judge Jackson heard hundreds of cases, issued a total of 562 decisions and presided over 12 trials. Among them were some of the most high-profile legal stories of the day, such as a dispute over whether a House panel could compel testimony from former White House counsel Don McGahn, along with the sentencing for the "Pizzagate" shooter in D.C.
She was nominated to the D.C. Circuit in March 2021 in Biden's first wave of judicial selections and appeared before the Senate Judiciary Committee in April, during which Republicans discussed her status as a "future Supreme Court nominee" and unsuccessfully tried to get her to wade into controversial topics like court packing.
She was confirmed in June in a 53-44 vote and had been on the U.S. appeals court less than a year when, on Jan. 30, White House counsel Dana Remus contacted her about the upcoming vacancy from Justice Breyer's recently announced retirement. She first met with Vice President Kamala Harris over Zoom and was later interviewed by President Biden at the White House. Biden formerly offered her the job on Feb. 24.
Despite her many rulings, Jackson's judicial philosophy is still coming into view. As a district and circuit court judge, she has been bound by the precedent of the Supreme Court and the D.C. Circuit. Supreme Court justices, in contrast, have more leeway in shaping the direction of the court's precedents, and therefore significant attention will be paid in the coming weeks to her views on the Constitution, statutory interpretation and contentious issues like abortion, affirmative action and more.
In an unscripted moment during an event in 2015, Jackson was asked what kind of judge she'd like to be remembered as in 20 years.
"I think that I would like to be remembered as a judge who was both careful and thorough in my opinions," she said. "I feel especially in the age of Westlaw, where people can get on the computer and pull up your opinions, that they represent me in a way. I am a person who is very organized and thorough in my thought processes, and so I like for my opinions to reflect that. So I think if I were to have a legacy it would be sort of careful and thoughtful and thorough in my opinions."
Listen to the podcast for the full story on Judge Jackson's journey to potentially becoming "Justice Jackson."
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