Updated June 14, 2021 at 6:49 PM ET
Ketanji Brown Jackson, a hot prospect for nomination to the Supreme Court should a vacancy arise, has been confirmed to the U.S. Court of Appeals by the Senate.
With Monday's 53-44 vote, Jackson takes the place of Merrick Garland, who resigned from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit when he became U.S. attorney general.
Jackson has been a federal trial court judge since 2013 and was on former President Barack Obama's Supreme Court shortlist in 2016.
Back then, she was a long shot, but not this time. Biden has pledged he will name an African American woman to the Supreme Court, and the 50-year-old judge ticks off just about every box that liberals might want in a nominee, and some that conservatives would want, too.
Jackson's career path and consensus-building
Raised in Miami, she was a national oratory champion in high school, then graduated with honors from Harvard College and Harvard Law School, where she was an editor of the law review.
She clerked for three federal judges, including Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer, now 82, who is the most likely member of the high court to step down, though he has given no public indication he plans to do so.
Whereas four members of the current Supreme Court served at one time as prosecutors, Jackson was a public defender, representing indigent defendants. She also practiced in law firms big and small, and served as vice chairman of the U.S. Sentencing Commission at a time when it sought to reduce the draconian penalties that had been in place for crack cocaine. There she earned a reputation for building consensus, and most of the panel's decisions were unanimous.
A love story and life outside the courtroom
For Jackson, sentencing is not an abstract matter. When she was in high school, her uncle was sentenced to life in prison, under a three-strikes law, for a low-level drug crime. He was granted clemency after serving 30 years.
Jackson's parents were both public school teachers until her father became a lawyer, and her mother, eventually, a school principal. The judge met her husband, Dr. Patrick Jackson, at Harvard College. He was, she says, her first, "serious boyfriend," and has remained that ever since.
At first blush, they look like an improbable couple.
As she put it in a charming — and candid — speech at the University of Georgia law school in March 2017, "Patrick is a quintessential 'Boston Brahmin' — his family can be traced back to England before the Mayflower. ... He and his twin brother are, in fact, the sixth generation in their family to graduate from Harvard College. By contrast, I am only the second generation in my family to go to any college, and I am fairly certain that if you traced my family lineage back past my grandparents — who were raised in Georgia, by the way — you would find that my ancestors were slaves on both sides."
Federal Judge Patti Saris, who hired Jackson as a law clerk straight out of law school, recalls her husband, who now looks full-on prep, as less so back then. At the time, he was a surgical resident at Massachusetts General Hospital, but he was so fascinated by his wife's work he would often go to the courtroom after a long night on call to watch what was going on. As Saris remembers, the young doctor had often been up for 24-plus hours and looked incredibly scruffy, sitting in the back of the courtroom. Finally, one day, the judge's courtroom marshal came up to her and whispered, "Judge, would you like me to remove the homeless man in the back row?"
The doctor, a star in the surgical world today, is the first to toot his wife's horn. His wife said in that Georgia speech that being a federal judge was always her "dream job." But after Obama nominated her in 2012, actually getting that job depended entirely on events beyond her control, namely Obama's reelection.
"And when you add to that," she added, "the fact that I am related by marriage to ... Paul Ryan [then the House speaker], who was at that point running for vice president against President Obama, you can get the sense of what that period was like for me."
Once confirmed, Jackson quickly became known for her long hours of work, a vivid writing style and her infectious and raucous laugh.
Her sense of humor about life was on full display at the University of Georgia when she talked about her two teenage daughters and the "whiplash" between her two roles. On the one hand, she's a federal judge, "which means people generally treat me with respect ... and I control what happens in my courtroom," and on the other, she has a maternal role in which "my daughters make it very clear that as far as they are concerned, I know nothing and should not tell them anything, much less, give them any orders — that is if they talk to me at all."
Ruling in a prominent Trump-era case
In her nearly eight years as a federal district court judge, Jackson has amassed a record in cases ranging from criminal law to regulatory, civil rights and constitutional law. Her most prominent decision came when she ordered former White House counsel Don McGahn to appear before the House Judiciary Committee to testify about possible obstruction of justice by then-President Donald Trump.
McGahn had been a star witness in special prosecutor Robert Mueller's investigation, and the House committee wanted to question him to determine if there were grounds for impeachment. But Trump ordered McGahn not to testify, and the committee went to court to enforce its subpoena.
In a 118-page decision, Jackson rejected Trump's argument that a president's close advisers and former advisers such as McGahn are absolutely immune to demands they appear and testify before Congress.
That immunity "simply does not exist," Jackson declared. "Presidents are not kings. This means that they do not have subjects bound by loyalty or blood, whose destiny they are entitled to control." Rather, she wrote, "in this land of liberty, White House employees ... work for the people of the United States."
The Trump administration appealed, and the case is still pending.
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