New SCOTUS short-list name to excite sentencing fans: Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson
[T]he president will be inclined to appoint a highly qualified black woman to the Court who has been recently confirmed. In a previous post, I said that the most likely candidate is Attorney General Loretta Lynch. I continue to think her credentials are strong. But it is worth noting that her confirmation vote in the Senate was close (because of Republican votes), so the administration could not make the point that she had been uniformly supported in the past….
There is another potential sticking point — one on which people directly involved in Democratic Supreme Court nominations are torn. The confirmation process would give Republicans the excuse to demand a wide array of documents that are related — maybe tangentially — to Lynch’s service as attorney general. These could include documents relating to decisions to initiate investigations and prosecutions. Benghazi is one example among many. In the view of some, that is a deal-breaker for the nomination. The administration won’t want to expose itself to those demands. Others think it could be worked out, as it was with respect to documents from Elena Kagan’s time as Solicitor General….
If not Lynch, who? There does not seem to be any obvious candidate in the federal courts of appeals. But there is a district judge.
Ketanji Brown Jackson is a judge on the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia. She was confirmed by without any Republican opposition in the Senate not once, but twice. She was confirmed to her current position in 2013 by unanimous consent — that is, without any stated opposition. She was also previously confirmed unanimously to a seat on the U.S. Sentencing Commission (where she became vice chair).
She is a young — but not too young (forty-five) — black woman. Her credentials are impeccable. She was a magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College and cum laude graduate of Harvard Law School. She clerked on the Supreme Court (for Justice Stephen Breyer) and had two other clerkships as well. As a lawyer before joining the Sentencing Commission, she had various jobs, including as a public defender.
Her family is impressive. She is married to a surgeon and has two young daughters. Her father is a retired lawyer and her mother a retired school principal. Her brother was a police officer (in the unit that was the basis for the television show The Wire) and is now a law student, and she is related by marriage to Congressman (and Speaker of the House) Paul Ryan.
Judge Brown Jackson’s credentials would be even stronger if she were on the court of appeals rather than the district court and if she had been a judge for longer than three years. One person whom I know who has been deeply and directly involved in prior confirmations is confident the president would not nominate someone from the district court. I disagree because these are special circumstances. It is easy to see a political dynamic in which candidate Hillary Clinton talks eagerly and often about Judge Brown Jackson in the run-up to the 2016 election, to great effect.
Even if I was not familiar with Judge Brown Jackson, the fact she had been a federal public defender would appeal greatly to me. But I am familiar with Judge Brown Jackson because I had a few lovely opportunities to interact with her professionally when she was a member of the US Sentencing Commission and I had dinner with her and a few others once during a US Sentencing Commission conference.
On the merits, I think Judge Brown Jackson’s status as a district judge should actually be a plus on a Supreme Court that has often (and rightly) been accused of not being attentive to or even seemingly aware of the practical impact of its rulings for trial courts. I was not previously aware of Judge Brown Jackson’s connection to House Speaker Paul Ryan, but A bit of research revealed these notable comments from Speaker Ryan at her confirmation hearing to become a US District Judge:
I appreciate the opportunity to share my favorable recommendation for Ketanji Brown Jackson. I know she is clearly qualified. But it bears repeating just how qualified she is….
Now, our politics may differ, but my praise for Ketanji’s intellect, for her character, for her integrity, it is unequivocal. She is an amazing person, and I favorably recommend your consideration.
At the same hearing, notably, Senator Charles Grassley (who is now the all-important Chair of the Judiciary Committee) followed up by saying “Ms. Jackson, I thought after Ryan got done speaking about you we could just vote you out right away.” These comments by leading Republicans would seem to go a very long way to enabling Prez Obama to make much of the fact that leading Republicans have already testified strongly about to her “intellect, … her character, … her integrity.”
Prior related posts on new SCOTUS nominee possibilities: