The First (continued)

During the 2020 US Presidential Election, then Democratic Presidential Candidate Joe Biden made a promise to the country, and especially to his African American base, that if he became president, he would nominate the first African American women to the Supreme Court. During the month of February, Black History Month, now President Joe Biden, has nominated the first Black Women to sit on the Supreme Court, Judge Ketanji Brown-Jackson. If confirmed by the US Senate, Judge Brown Jackson would be replacing the soon to be retired, Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer, with whom she has clerked for in the past. She would also be a former public defender to fill the vacancy, which has criminal justice reform activist energized. The last former public defender to sit on the court was Justice Thurgood Marshall. She would also be the second youngest justice to the supreme court, just behind Justice Amy Coney Barrett, who is a year younger.

Judge Jackson, who grew up in Florida, but was born in Washington, D.C., was raised by parents who both attended HBCUs. Her father a lawyer, and her mother a principal of a magnet school. She attended Harvard for both undergrad and law school in 1992 and 1996, while working as a reporter and researcher in between at Time Magazine. Over the next seventeen years after law school she worked three federal clerkships, at four elite law firms, and served two stints with the Sentencing Commission. In 1996, She worked as a clerk to U.S District Judge Patti Saris, and then for Judge Bruce Selya, until 1998. She then became an associate at the D.C. firm Miller Cassidy Larroca & Lewin. After a year at the firm, she clerked for Justice Breyer, but once the clerkship ended, she became an associate in the Boston office of Goodwin Procter. Jackson left Goodwin Procter in 2002 to become an associate at the firm that is now Feinberg Rozen, where she was assistant special counsil on the U.S. Sentencing Commission, where they documented federal disparities in sentencing.

Jackson, then became a federal public defender in D.C. She can be quoted as saying, “I think that’s really important for our entire justice system because it’s only if people understand what they’ve done, why it’s wrong, and what will happen to them if they do it again that they can really start to rehabilitate,” when she realized how much her clients didn’t’ understand about the criminal justice system. Then, her legal profession led her to work for a San Francisco firm Morrison & Foerster in 2007. President Obama nominated Jackson to serve as vice chair of the Sentencing Commission in 2010. Ha also nominated her to the U.S. district judge in Washington, D.C. in both September of 2012 and January of 2013. She then spent seven years as a district judge handling many high-profile cases, to be finally be nominated to the D.C. Circuit Court in 2021 with bipartisan support. The African American community is looking forward to seeing Biden’s promise fulfilled, and Judge Jackson break the glass ceiling.