The Honorable Ketanji Brown Jackson visited St. Croix this week, where she spoke to students and — if U.S. District Judge Wilma Lewis is to be believed — danced the quadrille for the first time. Jackson sat down with Lewis for a discussion of her early life and career Thursday night at the Sydney Lee Entertainment Center.
Jackson was born in Washington, D.C., to parents who were both public schoolteachers. She grew up in Miami after her father moved the family there to study law at the University of Miami, and Jackson said some of her earliest memories were of sitting at the table with her father — him with law books, her with coloring books.
Throughout the 90-minute discussion with Lewis, Jackson repeatedly cited the impact of her parents, who pushed her to participate in extracurricular activities like music lessons and swimming.
The latter led to what Jackson described as a formative experience.
During a pool party, a seven- or eight-year-old Jackson was floating in the pool and drifted away from the safety of the ledge. Then, she said, she began to sink. Fortunately, an adult jumped in and saved her. Though relieved to have been saved, Jackson told the crowd Thursday that she was angry at herself — she knew how to swim, so why had she panicked? She resolved that if she ever found herself in “the deep end” again, she wouldn’t lose her cool.
“I would swim,” she said.
Though her interest in the law came early — thanks to her father — Jackson said she was inspired to pursue a judgeship while reading a Jet Magazine profile of pioneering civil rights attorney Constance Baker Motley, the first African American woman appointed to the federal judiciary.
Jackson later attended Radcliffe College, which fully merged with Harvard University in 1999, and graduated cum laude from Harvard Law School in 1996. After earning her J.D., she clerked for three judges: Judge Patti Saris of the U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts; Judge Bruce M. Selya of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit; and Justice Stephen Breyer of the U.S. Supreme Court.
Following a stint in private practice, Jackson served as an attorney for the U.S. Sentencing Commission — an independent agency within the federal judicial branch responsible for promulgating sentencing guidelines — and spent two years as an assistant federal public defender in Washington D.C.
“And I noticed, when I was a public defender, how few of my clients actually understood the judicial process that was shaping their entire lives,” she said Thursday. Jackson said the experience informed her later work as judge for the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, where she said she took pains to make sure the people in her courtroom understood what was happening.
Jackson and Lewis went on to discuss the associate justice’s nomination to the U.S. Supreme Court — and the grueling confirmation process that followed. After a nerve-wracking vetting process, Jackson said she had all but convinced herself that someone else was getting the job. Then, one Thursday night, former President Joseph Biden called her on her cellphone. The White House released a recording of that call from Biden’s perspective.
“What you can’t know, or what you don’t know, is that I was like under my desk,” Jackson said, laughing.
Though she weathered scathing lines of questioning from Republic lawmakers during the ensuing confirmation hearings, Jackson said Thursday that her private meetings with lawmakers during the confirmation process were “to a person” lovely. When the hearings began, Jackson said she recalled thinking that lawmakers weren’t really talking to her — they were acting for their constituents.
“This is a performance, is what I’m thinking in my head. And that helped me to stay calm, to understand what everybody’s roles were,” she said.
Jackson took her seat on the U.S. Supreme Court in June 2022. On Thursday, she said little about the court itself and less about the current climate in Washington, D.C., though she noted that there is an institutional focus on maintaining traditions of cordiality and collegiality. One way the justices do that, she said, is by having lunch breaks where they’re not allowed to talk about cases.
Jackson is slated to give a similar talk to St. Thomas residents on Friday.
