Jackson, Ketanji Brown

Impact on the world

After clerking at every level of the federal judiciary, including for Justice Stephen Breyer during the Supreme Court's 1999 term, Jackson spent two years as an assistant federal public defender in Washington, D.C., where a Washington Post review found she won “uncommon victories against the government that shortened or erased lengthy prison terms” — experience that made her the first justice since Thurgood Marshall to have represented criminal defendants and the first-ever former public defender on the Court. Nominated to the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia by President Obama in 2012, she spent eight years on that bench, ruling in 2019 that former White House Counsel Don McGahn had to comply with a congressional subpoena and writing that “Presidents are not kings” who could claim their aides owed no accountability to Congress; President Biden elevated her to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit in 2021, and less than a year later nominated her to the Supreme Court seat vacated by her former mentor, Justice Breyer. Confirmed by the Senate 53-47 on April 7, 2022, with three Republican votes joining all 50 Democrats, Jackson declared at her White House nomination ceremony that “it has taken 232 years and 115 prior appointments for a Black woman to be selected to serve on the Supreme Court of the United States. But we've made it”; she cited pioneering civil rights attorney and federal judge Constance Baker Motley, with whom she shares a birthday 49 years apart, as a lifelong inspiration. Jackson published a bestselling memoir, Lovely One, in 2024, drawing its title from the meaning of her given name, chosen by her parents from a list of African names sent by a relative serving in the Peace Corps in West Africa.

Life & background

Born Ketanji Onyika Brown on September 14, 1970, in Washington, D.C., and raised in Miami, Florida, by two public school educators, Jackson earned her A.B. magna cum laude from Harvard-Radcliffe College in 1992 and her J.D. cum laude from Harvard Law School in 1996, where she served on the Harvard Law Review. She served as a U.S. District Judge for the District of Columbia from 2013 to 2021, on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit from 2021 to 2022, and has served as an Associate Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court since June 30, 2022.

Sources

1. Encyclopædia Britannica; Oyez; Harvard Law School