#HBCUfam, let’s applaud the nomination of Ketanji Brown Jackson to the United States Supreme Court.
In a social media post, beloved Iota Phi Theta Fraternity, Inc. congratulated Jackson on her nomination, saying that it is an excellent way to top off Black History Month.
*Side note 📝: #BHM is 24/7 + 365.
“Judge Jackson is a historical high point in our nation’s legal system. For too long, the perspective of Black women has been missing from the deliberations of our Supreme Court justices.”
The fraternity continued: “Like the nomination of Thurgood Marshall to the Supreme Court in 1967, Judge Jackson’s nomination is cause for America to celebrate and for the Black community to honor this accomplished woman. There could be no greater exclamation mark for” this month.
Per The Guardian:
“She has always wanted this. Ketanji Brown Jackson, President Biden’s nominee to fill the supreme court seat left vacant by the retirement of Stephen Breyer at the end of this term, said that she wanted to become a judge one day in the yearbook from her Miami high school. By then she was already a champion in national oratory competitions, sharpening the skills of rhetoric and cadence that are the stock and trade of ambitious lawyers. Her parents – an attorney and a school principal – saw their daughter’s potential, and helped her to hoist herself from her middle-class origins onto the path followed by ambitious lawyers from more patrician backgrounds.She went to Harvard for undergrad and then to Harvard Law, eventually clerking on the court for Breyer himself – a justice known to be particularly picky with his clerkships.
She seems to have pursued the law with single-minded devotion since she was very young, committing herself to the profession with all the passion and devotion of a vocation.
But her legal career took her to places most supreme court justices’ careers have not: In addition to her standard bona fides in private practice and later on the federal bench, she served on the United States Sentencing Commission, working to assess federal criminal sentencing practices and advocating for reduced sentences for drug offenders. Later, she served as a federal public defender in Washington. This makes her the first former public defender nominated to the court, and the first since Thurgood Marshall with extensive criminal defense experience. Her nomination signals a respect for a field of legal practice with great moral authority but little respect from the legal establishment: advocating for the rights of criminal defendants and the poor.
When Biden nominated Jackson to a seat on the DC circuit court just last summer, the post was widely seen as a stepping-stone to the supreme court itself: Jackson had already been all but anointed as Breyer’s successor. She sailed through that confirmation, even bagging three Republican votes. The ease of her last appointment, even amid the backdrop of her future one, suggested that Senate Republicans had not been able to manufacture controversy from her record, a failure on their part that suggests remarkable discipline on Jackson’s. She seems to have behaved in a manner becoming a federal judge her whole life. It’s as if she was born wearing a black robe.”
Head over to The Guardian to read more.
