Ketanji Brown Jackson

Ketanji Onyika Brown was born on September 14, 1970, in Washington, D.C. Her parents, Johnny and Ellery Brown, had moved north from Miami during a period of deep segregation in the Florida public schools. They moved back when Ketanji was a toddler. She grew up in Miami. Her father attended the University of Miami School of Law at night, working as a schoolteacher during the day, and went on to serve as chief attorney for the Miami-Dade County School Board. Her mother became a public-school principal.

The name Ketanji Onyika was given to her, her father has explained, by an aunt who was serving in the Peace Corps in West Africa and sent a list of African names when Ketanji was born. It means, roughly, lovely one. She grew up under a name that required her to introduce herself with care. She learned early the habit of speaking clearly, on the record, about who she was.

She was a champion debater at Miami Palmetto Senior High School, graduating in 1988 as the student body president. Her high school guidance counselor, she has said, discouraged her from applying to Harvard on the view that she was aiming too high. She applied anyway. She was admitted. At Harvard College she majored in government and graduated magna cum laude in 1992. She went to Harvard Law School and graduated cum laude in 1996, having served as a supervising editor of the Harvard Law Review.

She clerked for Judge Patti Saris of the U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts in 1996 and 1997, then for Judge Bruce Selya of the First Circuit in 1997 and 1998, then for Justice Stephen Breyer of the U.S. Supreme Court during the 1999 and 2000 term. She practiced at the Washington firm Morrison & Foerster, then at Feinberg Rozen, then as an assistant special counsel at the U.S. Sentencing Commission. She was among the lawyers who drafted the federal sentencing guidelines that govern crack cocaine cases after Congress and the courts began unwinding the 100-to-1 disparity with powder cocaine.

From 2005 to 2007 she served as an assistant federal public defender in the District of Columbia. She represented indigent defendants at trial and on appeal, including at the D.C. Circuit. At the time of her Supreme Court confirmation in 2022, she was the first former federal public defender to sit on the Supreme Court since Thurgood Marshall, who had worked on criminal appeals at the NAACP Legal Defense Fund before his own elevation to the court.

President Obama nominated her to the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia in 2012. The Senate confirmed her unanimously in 2013. She served on that court for eight years. She wrote more than 550 opinions. She presided over AFGE v. Trump, the 2018 case in which she enjoined an executive order limiting federal-employee union bargaining rights, writing that the president is not a king. The D.C. Circuit reversed her on jurisdictional grounds; the core of her statutory reasoning was widely cited in later federal labor opinions.

President Biden elevated her to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit in June 2021. She served on that court less than a year. On February 25, 2022, Biden nominated her to the Supreme Court of the United States to fill the seat of the retiring Justice Stephen Breyer, the man for whom she had clerked twenty-two years earlier.

Her confirmation hearings ran from March 21 to March 24, 2022, before the Senate Judiciary Committee. She was questioned by twenty-two senators over four days. A subset of senators mischaracterized her sentencing record in child-pornography cases. Independent fact-checks from the Washington Post, the New York Times, the Associated Press, and the Sentencing Commission's own public data rebutted those characterizations. The American Bar Association gave her its highest rating, unanimously well qualified.

On April 7, 2022, the Senate confirmed her by a vote of 53 to 47. Senators Susan Collins of Maine, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, and Mitt Romney of Utah crossed their party to vote yes. She was sworn in on June 30, 2022, when Justice Breyer formally retired. She was the 116th Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States, the first Black woman to hold the office, and the sixth woman overall.

Her first written opinion was delivered in November 2022, a unanimous decision in a civil procedure case about the Federal Arbitration Act. Her longer-form work arrived the following term. In Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard (2023), she filed a dissent in the companion North Carolina case that traced the historical record of the Fourteenth Amendment and the documented role of federally sanctioned racial policy in American property and education. In Trump v. United States (2024), she filed a dissent to the majority's recognition of presumptive presidential immunity that began, plainly, by laying out what the majority had done and naming its costs.

She has sat on the court since. She writes. She asks questions from the bench at a higher rate than most of her colleagues. Her memoir, Lovely One, was published by Random House in September 2024 and reached number one on the New York Times nonfiction list within a week of release. Her husband, Dr. Patrick Jackson, is a surgeon at Georgetown and Massachusetts General. Their two daughters, Talia and Leila, watched the confirmation vote from the Senate gallery on April 7, 2022.

There is no retirement date and no conclusion yet for this entry. The seat held for 232 years by men, then for the remainder of that span by white women, has a Black woman in it now. The court decides cases. She writes opinions. The record is open and being kept.