Given her confirmation, could President Biden’s Supreme Court nominee inspire one of her new colleagues to see the world in a different way?
There doesn’t seem to be a Sandra Day O’Connor lurking in today’s carefully crafted conservative supermajority, and the heroic trajectory of Thurgood Marshall’s life is not the story of Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson. It’s fair to say she has more in common with the judge she’s supposed to replace. Like Stephen Breyer, she was a star student at an outstanding public high school. Her father, like his, worked as a lawyer for a school board in a major city (Miami in her case, San Francisco in his). Success at Harvard Law School propelled them both to Supreme Court internships (in fact, she worked for him). Often referred to as the father of federal sentencing guidelines, Judge Breyer was a member of the original U.S. sentencing commission, where she later became vice chair.
In drawing these parallels, I deliberately did not emphasize race. Yes, her nomination fulfills the president’s campaign promise to appoint a black woman, the first to the Supreme Court. While that’s cause for celebration, it shouldn’t obscure the other kinds of diversity she would bring to court.
Diversity has many dimensions, including perspective. That she would be the first former public defender to sit in court has gained widespread notoriety, much less the fact that as a public school graduate, she would be a rarity among judges. After Judge Breyer’s departure, only two remain: Elena Kagan, who attended the highly selective Hunter College High School in Manhattan, hardly a typical public school, and Samuel Alito, who attended Steinert High School in Hamilton Township, NJ. , near Trenton, his hometown. † Every other member of the court graduated from a Catholic high school, a striking but little-noted fact at a time when matters involving public and religious schools and the relationship between the two are prominent on the court’s role.
Justice Breyer’s wife Joanna is a clinical psychologist who, during her active career, has specialized in working with children being treated for cancer at the Lahey Clinic in Boston. Does having a medical professional in the family explain Judge Breyer’s emphasis on facts and evidence in his opinions on medical topics? With medical questions barely going to get off the court, it’s worth noting that Judge Jackson’s husband, Patrick, is a surgeon. (Justice Sonia Sotomayor’s brother, Juan, is a physician with an allergy practice in upstate New York.) Some conservative judges seem to believe that doctors are not acting in the best interests of their patients, whether they are performing abortions or administering vaccines. Perhaps Judge Jackson can convince them otherwise.
