Ketanji Brown Jackson

Ketanji Brown Jackson (born September 14, 1970, Washington, D.C.) is an associate justice of the Supreme Court of the United States from 2022. She is the first Black woman to serve on the Supreme Court.

Early life and education

Ketanji Onyika Brown was the first of two children of Johnny and Ellery Brown, both of whom were public school teachers at the time of her birth. The family then moved from Washington, D.C., to Miami, Florida, where her father earned a law degree from the University of Miami and became an attorney for the school board of Miami-Dade County. Her mother became a school principal.

Brown grew up in Miami, where she attended public schools. While a student at Miami Palmetto Senior High School, she served as class president and excelled in speech and debate competitions. In 1988 she enrolled at Harvard University, where she met Patrick Jackson, also a Harvard student, whom she married in 1996. In 1992 she graduated magna cum laude from Harvard with a bachelor’s degree in government. In her senior year she wrote an honors thesis examining the role of coercion in plea bargaining.

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After working for one year as a journalist and researcher at Time magazine, she entered Harvard Law School, graduating with a juris doctor (J.D.) degree in 1996. While there she served as a supervising editor of the Harvard Law Review.

Federal clerkships and U.S. Sentencing Commission

In the years after she earned her law degree, Jackson completed three prestigious federal clerkships (typically one-year positions held by top graduates from highly regarded law schools): for Judge Patti Saris of the U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts; for Judge Bruce Selya of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit; and, after a one-year stint as an attorney, for Justice Stephen Breyer. (Judicial clerks help judges to process cases, review briefs, conduct legal research, and draft opinions.)

Following her clerkships, Jackson alternated between jobs with private law firms and public-service positions with the federal government. She worked for the United States Sentencing Commission, an independent agency that studies and establishes sentencing guidelines for the federal judiciary, from 2003 to 2005 and as a federal public defender in Washington, D.C., from 2005 to 2007. In 2010 she returned to the Sentencing Commission as a commissioner and the commission’s vice chair, an appointment (by Democratic Pres. Barack Obama) that required and received confirmation by the U.S. Senate. In that role Jackson and her fellow commissioners made retroactive the 2010 Fair Sentencing Act, which had reduced the disparity in sentences for crimes involving crack cocaine and crimes involving powder cocaine. The commissioners’ action made it possible for defendants who had been convicted under the previous legal regime to seek reduced sentences.

District and appellate court judgeships

On September 20, 2012, Obama nominated Jackson to the federal district court of Washington, D.C. After the Senate failed to act on the nomination, Obama renominated her in January 2013, and she was confirmed by a voice vote in March. Jackson was recognized by Supreme Court observers as a rising star and a likely candidate for elevation to a higher court, including possibly the Supreme Court. She reportedly had been on Obama’s short list of candidates to replace Justice Antonin Scalia in 2016—a nomination that went eventually to Merrick Garland, chief judge of the D.C. Circuit, and was then ignored by the Republican-controlled Senate.

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Jackson’s most high-profile decision as a district court judge came in a case involving Republican Pres. Donald Trump’s former White House counsel Don McGahn. The Judiciary Committee of the House of Representatives requested that the court compel McGahn’s testimony as part of the committee’s inquiry into alleged Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election (see also Donald Trump: Russia investigation). McGahn refused—following the instructions of the Trump White House, which cited executive privilege, the legal principle that the executive branch of the federal government is entitled to shield certain internal decision-making processes from outside scrutiny. Rejecting that position, Jackson held that presidents lack the power to prohibit all staff and former staff from testifying, declaring that “the primary takeaway from the past 250 years of recorded American history is that Presidents are not kings.”

In April 2021 Democratic Pres. Joe Biden nominated Jackson to the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, where she would fill the vacancy left by Merrick Garland, who had left the appeals court to serve as U.S. attorney general. Jackson was confirmed by a Senate vote of 53 to 44 (three senators abstained) on June 14, 2021. Every Democratic senator (and two independent senators who caucused with the Democratic Party) voted to confirm her, along with three Republicans.

During Jackson’s time as an appeals court judge, she again confronted the issue of the Trump administration’s assertion of executive privilege. In the case Trump v. Thompson, the D.C. circuit court had considered a claim by former president Trump that executive privilege entitled him to refuse to turn over documents to the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol (see United States Capitol Attack of 2021). Jackson joined the appeals court’s opinion affirming the lower court’s decision denying Trump’s motion to block the committee’s request.