Coverage of Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson’s Monday night remarks in Washington primarily focused on her critiques of the court’s decision to immediately finalize its ruling in the Louisiana redistricting case and her concerns about the court appearing partisan in an election year. And while those may have been the most newsworthy things she said, Jackson also spoke on her upbringing in Miami, the “crazy” environment that came with her Supreme Court appointment, and why she believes Justice Stephen Breyer offered her a clerkship.
The conversation, moderated by U.S. District Judge Richard Gergel at the American Law Institute’s annual meeting, opened with Jackson reading from the preface of Lovely One, her memoir published in 2024.
From there, Jackson walked the audience through her family’s story (“a family of strivers,” she called them) with the help of a slideshow of photographs, pausing on images of her grandparents, who migrated from Georgia to Miami in 1939 in search of greater opportunity. Jackson explained that her grandfather started a gardening business and put all five of his children through college. “He knew that that was going to be the key,” Jackson said, “Making that investment in education was going to be the way in which our family would be able to survive and improve.” She also described how her aunt, who was working as a missionary in West Africa when Jackson was born, sent a list of African names to her mother, from which her mother chose the name Ketanji Onyika, meaning “lovely one.”
Jackson then explained that, while she was still a child, her father made a mid-career change from teaching history in D.C. to attending the University of Miami Law School. “I actually never thought you could do anything other than be a lawyer,” Jackson said. “Because that’s what I knew, you know, when you grow up on the campus of a law school, education becomes what you know, law became what I was interested in from that young.”
Prompted by Gergel, Jackson added that her father eventually became the lawyer for the school board for the Dade County Public School district, and that is what she and Breyer connected over during her clerkship interview. “I am to this day convinced I got the interview or got the job with Justice Breyer because Justice Breyer’s father was the lawyer for the school board in San Francisco. And he was so excited when he heard that, he thought he had something in common with me.”
Jackson also shared a story from her memoir about a defining moment in high school, when a store clerk followed her around a shop while her white classmates moved freely. She described going home to her grandmother, who urged her not to let it define her. “And don’t let them get inside you,” her grandmother told her.
When asked what life had been like since her nomination to the court, Jackson said that “it’s only been four years that I’ve been on the court and it’s like overnight your life changes. … You go from being a relatively anonymous judge in the world to being someone that people recognize.”
When the conversation turned to the court’s emergency docket – a concern Jackson has raised before, including during a lecture at Yale Law School earlier this year – she reprised her criticism of the court increasingly intervening in cases still pending before lower courts, often without full briefing or argument. She proposed two remedies: a threshold requirement of genuine urgency before intervention, and a reordering of the factors the court applies, putting irreparable harm ahead of likelihood of success on the merits.
Perhaps her most pointed comments came when Gergel raised Louisiana v. Callais, the Voting Rights Act case. Jackson talked about dissenting from the court’s decision to shorten its standard 32-day waiting period before finalizing the ruling, and said the court had deviated from that practice over a party’s objection only two or three times in roughly 25 years. As USA Today reported, Jackson said the court has “to be really, really careful in this environment when we’re dealing with issues that have a political overlay,” and that “public confidence is really all the judiciary has.”
Asked finally about her many dissents, Jackson said that she agreed with her colleague Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who “said that dissents are really written for a future age, that they lay down a marker for the future.” “Dissents, I think, are one of the most extraordinary aspects of the American legal tradition, because they actually embody one of our core values, the idea of freedom of expression and tolerance of minority views,” Jackson added. “This is something that is integral to who we are as Americans, and we have a practice that allows for that.”
