Ketanji Brown Jackson on Ethics, Trust, and Keeping It Collegial at the Supreme Court

The Political Scene | The New Yorker

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🗓️ 25 November 2024

⏱️ 27 minutes

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Summary

Since the founding of the nation, just 116 people have served as Supreme Court Justices; the 116th is Ketanji Brown Jackson, appointed by President Biden in 2022. Jackson joined a Court with six conservative Justices setting a new era of jurisprudence. She took her seat just days after the Dobbs decision, when Justice Samuel Alito’s majority opinion overturned Roe v. Wade. She wrote a blistering dissent to the Harvard decision, which ended affirmative action in college admissions, in which she accused the majority of a “let-them-eat-cake obliviousness” to the reality of race in America. She also dissented in the landmark Presidential-immunity case. Immunity might “incentivize an office holder to push the envelope, with respect to the exercise of their authority,” she tells David Remnick. “It was certainly a concern, and one that I did not perceive the Constitution to permit.” They also discussed the widely reported ethical questions surrounding the Court, and whether the ethical code it adopted ought to have some method of enforcement. But Jackson stressed that whatever the public perception, the nine Justices maintain old traditions of collegiality (no legal talk at lunch, period), and that she sometimes writes majority opinions as well as vigorous dissents. Jackson’s recent memoir is titled “Lovely One,” about her family, youth, and how she got to the highest position in American law.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	You're listening to the political scene. I'm David Remnick.
0:09.1	Early each week, we bring you a conversation from our episode of The New Yorker Radio Hour.
0:17.7	Since the founding of this country, just 116 people have served as Supreme Court justices.
0:24.6	The 116th is Justice Katanji Brown Jackson, who was appointed by President Biden in 2022.
0:32.5	Jackson's two years have been marked by major decisions that define a new conservative era for the court.
0:38.1	She took her seat just days after the Dobbs decision, which overturned Roe v. Wade.
0:44.5	Jackson wrote a blistering dissent to the end of affirmative action, the so-called Harvard
0:49.3	decision, and she dissented as well on presidential immunity, which is surely going to be one of the most
0:54.8	consequential cases of our time. She didn't pull her punches there. Jackson wrote that the majority
1:00.3	opinion took risks with presidential power that are, and I'm quoting here, intolerable, unwarranted,
1:07.0	and plainly antithetical to bedrock constitutional norms.
1:15.4	Katanji Brown-Jackson has just published a memoir about her family, her early life,
1:18.3	and how she got to the highest position in American law.
1:20.5	The book is called Lovely One.
1:30.7	Tell me a little bit about receiving the news of your becoming a Supreme Court justice.
1:37.8	Paint a picture for us, if you will, about how that news was received and what was said and how it was celebrated.
2:02.7	Oh, well, goodness. Wow. It was incredible. But, you know, one of the things your listeners should know is that there's a pretty long lead-up to getting appointed to be on the Supreme Court or any other court because you have to be vetted by the White House. You have to go through a long period of answering questions and filling out paperwork. So I knew I was possibly in the running. And, you know, I actually talk in the book about sitting down with my
2:09.7	family, my teenage daughters at the time and really wanting to make sure that this would
2:16.3	be a comfortable transition for them
2:18.5	if I were to get the nomination because one of my daughters is neurodivergent and I was
2:24.7	concerned that the spotlight would not be something that she would want to have. So we talked it
2:31.2	through and everyone was supportive and when I got the nomination, I was surprised because the president had announced that he was going to nominate or choose and publicly announce the person who was going to get the appointment by the end of the month.
	...

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