Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, Just in Time for Supreme Court Term, Gears Up To Bring Her Left Wing Fire and Brimstone to the Road

Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, the Supreme Court’s increasingly lonely and most liberal member, has a full schedule of speaking engagements over the next month, even as she gears up for another term of dissent from the left on the court itself. The court’s junior justice is no stranger to publicity tours. She released a memoir last year, “Lovely One — the meaning of her west African first name — for which she secured an advance of about $3 million. Publication was accompanied by an extensive publicity tour for Justice Jackson, who was named to the Supreme Court by President Biden in 2022.Extracurricular trips are often par for the course for Supreme Court justices, who make some $300,000 annually. The high court’s most recent disclosures show that Chief Justice Roberts taught constitutional law in Ireland, where he keeps a cottage, and Justice Sonia Sotomayor spent time in Panama, Switzerland, Austria, and Hawaii. Justice Neil Gorsuch visited Germany and Portugal.September will see Justice Jackson take a tour of the Upper South, with visits scheduled for the Carolinas and the Old Dominion. She has proven herself to be anything but shy when speaking from beyond the bench. In July, she told the Indianapolis Bar Association that she worries over “the state of our democracy” and that she is “not afraid to use my voice.”Justice Jackson demonstrated that outspoken streak frequently last term, issuing more solitary dissents than any other member of the court, meaning that she took positions that even her fellow liberals, Justice Sotomayor and Elena Kagan, refused to join. On occasion those dissents expressed not only disagreement with how the court applied the law, but also — in a breach of etiquette — took thinly veiled personal swipes at the motives of her colleagues.In an opinion released last month, in a case — National Institutes of Health v. American Public Health Association — that turned on whether President Trump could cancel some $800 million in grants related to health equity and “gender identity,” the court overruled the district court judge who had blocked those cuts and held that the president could — for now — terminate them. Justice Jackson, reaching for an allusion to the cherished comic strip “Calvin and Hobbes,” called the justices’ reasoning “Calvinball jurisprudence with a twist” except that “Calvinball has only one rule: There are no fixed rules. We seem to have two: that one, and this administration always wins.” Such allusions to the court’s alleged partisanship are rare in high court rhetoric.NIH was hardly the first time that Justice Jackson dressed down the court’s conservatives in strikingly personal terms. In Stanley v. City of Sanford she decried the court’s “unfortunate misunderstanding of the judicial role” and disclosed that she “cannot abide” such a “narrow-minded approach.” Justice Jackson — who’s argued for a more interventionist court that supports Democratic legal efforts to block President Trump — again contended that her colleagues were less than objective, arguing that their jurisprudence was driven by pursuit of a “desired outcome.”Even more heated rhetoric came from Justice Jackson’s chambers in Trump v. Casa, the case that emerged from a challenge to Mr. Trump’s effort to abolish birthright citizenship. The ruling — perhaps the most significant of the court’s last term — did not touch on the merits of that issue, but it did sharply curtail the ability of district court judges to issue nationwide or “universal” injunctions. That practice, a relatively recent one, had surged during Mr. Trump’s second term and has become the Democrats’ primary tool to arrest Mr. Trump’s executive actions. That the law allows for “judge shopping” — for plaintiffs to file in the district court of a judge appointed by a Democratic president — had created a major hindrance for the White House.Justice Jackson called the Casa ruling an “existential threat to the rule of law” and the creation of a “zone of lawlessness within which the Executive has the prerogative to take or leave the law as it wishes.” Justice Amy Coney Barrett, who wrote the majority opinion — and also has a book out this fall, with a $2 million advance — rebuked her colleague in sharp tones, calling her argument “tethered neither to … sources nor, frankly, to any doctrine whatsoever.” Justice Barrett wrote, “We will not dwell on Justice Jackson’s argument. … We observe only this: Justice Jackson decries an imperial Executive while embracing an imperial Judiciary.” In another decision, Justice Jackson wrote that her colleagues were delivering the impression that “moneyed interests enjoy an easier road to relief in this court.”So central has book-writing become to the contemporary Supreme Court that in a case from May involving the parent company of Penguin, Bertelsmann, five justices recused themselves. That meant that the court failed to meet its quorum of six justices, and a lower court ruling dismissing the case — in which the writer Ralph Baker alleged that the anti-Israel writer Ta-Nehisi Coates had pilfered from his memoir — stands as the final word. Justice Barrett, who was named to the Supreme Court by Mr. Trump in 2020, will on September 9 release “Listening to the Law: Reflections on the Court and Constitution.” The conservative imprint Sentinel, which will release the book, explains in a statement that “the process of judging, which happens behind closed doors, can seem like a mystery. It shouldn’t.”

Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, Just in Time for Supreme Court Term, Gears Up To Bring Her Left Wing Fire and Brimstone to the Road

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