Jackson Is the Perfect Choice for Today’s Supreme Court
A jurist with a background as a public defender and trial judge would change the tenor of the court, if not its dominant conservative ideology.
A pragmatic liberal.
Photographer: Kevin Lamarque-Pool/Getty Images
On a day when the world's eyes are rightly focused on a brazen challenge to the post-Cold War international order, Americans can rightly celebrate a domestic change that should make us proud: the nomination of Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson as the first Black female justice of the Supreme Court.
Historically, the “first” justices (Jewish, Black, female and so forth) have each made a very substantial impact on the court and its constitutional jurisprudence. Jackson now has the opportunity to join their ranks and craft a body of work that combines her characteristic intelligence, precision, judgment, pragmatism and warmth. She deserves to be on the court on the basis of her own remarkable accomplishments and talents. And her presence as a justice would make a crucial symbolic difference to the shaky legitimacy of the body.