Ketanji Brown Jackson’s Supreme Court Journey: Is She The Future Chief Justice?

//

(Photo by Win McNamee/Getty Images)

The perspectives and experiences she brings to the court as its first Black woman, and an incredibly brilliant woman at that, are bound to inform what even her most stubborn colleagues think about on which they haven’t firmly made up their minds already.

googletag.cmd.push( function() { // Enable lazy loading. googletag.pubads().enableLazyLoad({ renderMarginPercent: 150, mobileScaling: 2 }); // Display ad. googletag.display( "div-id-for-top-300x250" ); googletag.enableServices(); });

It’s not difficult to imagine her greatest dissents as a junior justice becoming the law of the land someday.

The fact that she will find herself in dissent more often than not in the cases that matter most over the next few years shouldn’t obscure the degree to which things can change. She won’t even turn 52 until mid-September, so she’s likely to serve for at least 30 years. The world in which she is among the most senior justices will be very different from the world she inherits as the most junior of the justices.

— Harvard Law professor Laurence Tribe, in comments given to Vivia Chen of Bloomberg Law on Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson’s arrival on the Supreme Court, and what her presence could mean for the future of the law. “It’s not hard to imagine her one day becoming Chief Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson,” he predicted, “breaking yet another concrete ceiling.”

googletag.cmd.push( function() { // Enable lazy loading. googletag.pubads().enableLazyLoad({ renderMarginPercent: 150, mobileScaling: 2 }); // Display ad. googletag.display( "div-id-for-middle-300x250" ); googletag.enableServices(); }); googletag.cmd.push( function() { // Enable lazy loading. googletag.pubads().enableLazyLoad({ renderMarginPercent: 150, mobileScaling: 2 }); // Display ad. googletag.display( "div-id-for-storycontent-440x100" ); googletag.enableServices(); }); googletag.cmd.push( function() { // Enable lazy loading. googletag.pubads().enableLazyLoad({ renderMarginPercent: 150, mobileScaling: 2 }); // Display ad. googletag.display( "div-id-for-in-story-youtube-1x1" ); googletag.enableServices(); });

Staci Zaretsky is a senior editor at Above the Law, where she’s worked since 2011. She’d love to hear from you, so please feel free to email her with any tips, questions, comments, or critiques. You can follow her on Twitter or connect with her on LinkedIn.

googletag.cmd.push( function() { // Enable lazy loading. googletag.pubads().enableLazyLoad({ renderMarginPercent: 150, mobileScaling: 2 }); // Display ad. googletag.display( "div-id-for-bottom-300x250" ); googletag.enableServices(); }); Topics

Courts, Ketanji Brown Jackson, Quote of the Day, Supreme Court