New York Times reporter Adam Liptak, a skilled former practicing lawyer, limns the recent dissents of Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, one of only two (2) current Supreme Court justices to have ever tried a lawsuit in a court of law. Justice Jackson, is in the spirit of the late Nuremberg prosecutor, Supreme Court Justice Robert Hoghwot Jackson, who actually tired cases, including work trying cases in New York State before judges in barns. Justice Ketanji Jackson Brown actually knows the truth based on personal experience. Sadly, ome of her colleagues, lazy loud he law review preppies, "know not that they know not that they know not," in the immortal words of my late whistleblower client, heroic EPA Office of Inspector General environmental crimes investigator Robert E. Tyndall. Some of the current Supreme Court justices require prayers and forgivenesss. What do y'al reckon? From The New York Times:
Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson Makes Herself Heard, Prompting a Rebuke
In solo dissents this term, the justice accused the conservative majority of lawless bias. On the term’s last day, Justice Amy Coney Barrett fired back.
Reporting from Washington
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Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson Makes Herself Heard, Prompting a Rebuke
In solo dissents this term, the justice accused the conservative majority of lawless bias. On the term’s last day, Justice Amy Coney Barrett fired back.
Reporting from Washington
Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson wrote just five majority opinions in the Supreme Court term that ended last month, the fewest of any member of the court. But her voice resonated nonetheless, in an unusually large number of concurring and dissenting opinions, more than 20 in all.
Several of them warned that the court was taking lawless shortcuts, placing a judicial thumb on the scale in favor of President Trump and putting American democracy in peril. She called the majority’s opinion in the blockbuster case involving birthright citizenship, issued on the final day of the term, “an existential threat to the rule of law.”
Justice Jackson, 54, is the court’s newest member, having just concluded her third term. Other justices have said it took them years to find their footing, but Justice Jackson, the first Black woman to serve on the court, quickly emerged as a forceful critic of her conservative colleagues and, lately, their approach to the Trump agenda.
Her opinions, sometimes joined by no other justice, have been the subject of scornful criticism from the right and have raised questions about her relationships with her fellow justices, including the other two members of its liberal wing.
“She’s breaking the fourth wall, speaking beyond the court,” said Melissa Murray, a law professor at New York University. “She is alarmed at what the court is doing and is sounding that in a different register, one that is less concerned with the appearance of collegiality and more concerned with how the court appears to the public.”
Her slashing critiques sometimes seemed to test her colleagues’ patience, culminating in an uncharacteristic rebuke from Justice Amy Coney Barrett in the case arising from Mr. Trump’s effort to ban birthright citizenship. In that case, the majority sharply limited the power of district court judges to block presidential orders, even if they are patently unconstitutional.
Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote the principal dissent for the court’s three-member liberal wing, including Justices Jackson and Elena Kagan.
Justice Jackson added her own dissent, speaking only for herself. She said the majority imperiled the rule of law, creating “a zone of lawlessness within which the executive has the prerogative to take or leave the law as it wishes.”
That prompted an extended response from Justice Barrett, the next most junior justice and the author of the majority opinion. It did not stint on condescension.
“We will not dwell on Justice Jackson’s argument, which is at odds with more than two centuries’ worth of precedent, not to mention the Constitution itself,” Justice Barrett wrote, in an opinion signed by all five of the other Republican appointees.
“The principal dissent focuses on conventional legal terrain,” Justice Barrett went on, referring to Justice Sotomayor’s opinion. “Justice Jackson, however, chooses a startling line of attack that is tethered neither to these sources nor, frankly, to any doctrine
whatsoever.”
Professor Murray said she suspected that Justice Barrett’s remarks were part of a larger agenda intended to silence a critic. “It was incredibly dismissive,” she said. “And I just wonder if it wasn’t just about this case, but rather about these asides that Justice Jackson has been leavening into her dissents.”
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Justice Jackson was appointed by President Joseph R. Biden Jr., fulfilling a campaign promise to name the first Black woman to the court. A graduate of Harvard College and Harvard Law School, she served as a law clerk to Justice Stephen G. Breyer and succeeded him.
Mr. Biden also appointed her to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, where she served for a year. The bulk of Justice Jackson’s judicial experience came in her eight years as a federal trial judge in Washington. Among her notable decisions there were ones blocking the first Trump administration’s attempts to fast-track deportations, to cut short grants for teen pregnancy prevention and to shield a former White House counsel from testifying before Congress.
Justice Jackson adjusted quickly to the Supreme Court. Other justices have said it took them years to get the hang of things.
“I was frightened to death for the first three years,” Justice Breyer said in a 2006 interview. Even Justice Louis D. Brandeis, a giant of the law who sat on the court from 1916 to 1939, needed time to find his footing. “So extraordinary an intellect as Brandeis said it took him four or five years to feel that he understood the jurisprudential problems of the court,” Justice Felix Frankfurter wrote of his friend and mentor.
“The first category concerns standard disagreements on the merits,” Professor Levy said. “The second category feels quite different — I think here we see dissents in which Justice Jackson is trying to raise the alarm. Whether she is writing for the public or a future court, she is making a larger point about what she sees as not just the errors of the majority’s position but the dangers of it as well.”
Justice Jackson, who did not respond to a request for comment, has also been a harsh critic of the court’s use of truncated procedures in ruling on emergency applications.
“This fly-by-night approach to the work of the Supreme Court is not only misguided,” she wrote in April, when the court said that Venezuelan men the administration was seeking to deport to El Salvador had sued in the wrong court. “It is also dangerous.”
In a dissent from an emergency ruling in June granting Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency access to sensitive Social Security data, Justice Jackson accused the majority of giving Mr. Trump favored treatment. “What would be an extraordinary request for everyone else,” she wrote, “is nothing more than an ordinary day on the docket for this administration.”
When the court let Mr. Trump lift humanitarian parole protectionsfor more than 500,000 migrants in May, Justice Jackson wrote that the majority had “plainly botched” the analysis, “rendering constraints of law irrelevant and unleashing devastation.”
Justices Jackson and Sotomayor are the only members of the court who have served as trial judges. In the last term, Justice Jackson repeatedly criticized the majority for undermining the authority of their colleagues on the front lines.
In the dissent that prompted Justice Barrett’s rebuke, she decried the majority’s “dismissive treatment of the solemn duties and responsibilities of the lower courts.”
Last year, in a dissent in a public corruption case, Justice Jackson seemed to allude to revelations by ProPublica and others that Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel A. Alito Jr. had failed to disclose luxury travel provided to them by billionaire benefactors, a strikingly critical swipe on a sensitive topic.
“Officials who use their public positions for private gain threaten the integrity of our most important institutions,” she wrote. “Greed makes governments — at every level — less responsive, less efficient and less trustworthy from the perspective of the communities they serve.”
Adam Liptak covers the Supreme Court and writes Sidebar, a column on legal developments. A graduate of Yale Law School, he practiced law for 14 years before joining The Times in 2002.
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Power being handed to anyone who wants it... power that came from people who were supposed to have more sense but don't anymore.
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