Ketanji Brown Jackson Is the Conscience of the Resistance

The Supreme Court operates on rigid custom and protocol. The court begins its term every first Monday in October and ends (“rises”) around the end of June. It votes in conferences that only the justices attend, and in strict order from most to least senior. Opinions are assigned by the senior justice on that side of the decision. The decisions themselves are worked out on written drafts that messengers circulate, walking the quiet carpets of the court.

In this hidebound atmosphere, even heated disagreements between factions of the court play out in largely decorous terms in the form of legal analyses that are directed toward one another’s arguments, not the political sphere or the outside world.

Special rules apply to the most junior of the justices. They are typically under pressure to go along rather than write solo opinions. Chief Justice John Roberts didn’t write his first lone dissent until his sixteenth year on the court.

So when Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson took the bench as the junior justice in 2022, after eight-plus years on the D.C. District Court, she might have been expected to be a quiet presence, biding her time and waiting her turn.

But Jackson arrived at the court at a particularly perilous time for the law and American society, when the conservative supermajority was issuing a series of controversial opinions that shifted the law sharply rightward. The stakes turned dire when Donald Trump returned to the presidency and pushed the justices to accede to a form of executive power bordering on autocracy.