At the age of 17, Ketanji Brown Jackson wrote down her biggest dream: “To be nominated as a judge some day.” Three decades later, he has exceeded all his expectations and has crossed the threshold of history, with a lifetime appointment to the Supreme Court of the United States.
(For context: Ketanji Brown Jackson is the US Supreme Court’s first black female justice.)
From the Roosevelt Room of the White House, along with President Joe Biden, Jackson watched emotionally this Thursday the vote in the Senate that It will make her the first African-American woman to serve on the Supreme Court in its 232-year history.
“Thank you for this historic opportunity to join the court with brilliant peers, to inspire future generations, and to ensure that there is freedom and justice for all,” the judge said during her confirmation hearings in March.
At 51 years old, Jackson is expected to have a long career on the high court, where she will join in a few months and will be just the fifth woman to wear that toga in the history of the country.
progressives favorite
From the beginning, Jackson was the favorite of progressives to fill the vacancy that Justice Stephen Breyer will vacate in the middle of the year.
The main reason is that when she was a judge in a federal court in Washington last decade, she frustrated some plans of the then president, Donald Trump.
His resume includes other striking points: Nearly two decades ago, he represented four inmates at the Guantánamo naval base in Cuba, and also helped reduce prison sentences for federal drug offenses.which disproportionately affect African Americans and Latinos.
In addition, Jackson will be the first Supreme Court justice to have experience as a federal attorney for low-income people, a job she did for two years to better understand how the criminal justice system worked.
Since last year she has been a judge on the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia, considered the second most important court in the country, after a career marked by effort and perseverance.
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His family, marked by segregation
Jackson’s grandparents grew up in the southern state of Georgia and both his father and mother, Both public school teachers, they were trained in schools segregated by race and then studied in universities for the black population.
“I’m pretty sure if you trace my family line … you’ll see that my ancestors were slaves on both sides,” Jackson said last year at a Senate hearing.
Born in Washington DC in 1970, Jackson spent most of her childhood and adolescence in Miami, inspired by her father’s passion for law, who studied law with voluminous books while she, at his side, colored notebooks from her kindergarten.
“It was my father who pushed me down this path,” the judge said in February, during her nomination ceremony at the White House.
Jackson’s parents, who proudly accompanied her through the confirmation hearings, wanted to give her a name that reflected her African heritage and opted for Ketanji Onyika, which means “beautiful,” or so a relative who had visited West Africa told them. .
“My parents taught me that, unlike them, who had to face many impenetrable barriers, my path would be clear, if I worked and believed in myselfJackson recalled in a speech last year.
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From Miami to Harvard
At the public high school where she studied in Miami, called Palmetto, she was a brilliant student who wrote in her graduation book her wish to be nominated as a judge one day.
Still, he faced obstacles probably related to his race: when he said he wanted to study at Harvard University, his academic adviser advised him “not to aim so high,” according to the White House.
Jackson wouldn’t listen and would go on to graduate cum laude twice from Harvard, before developing a meteoric career that included a stint as an aide to Breyer, the very Supreme Court justice he will now replace.
He also worked with the U.S. Sentencing Commission to reduce sentences for most federal drug crimes, including crack cocaine, freeing at least 1,800 inmates and shortening the sentences of some 12,000.
It was a matter he knew closely: his uncle was sentenced to life in prison for a non-violent drug crime, although he was finally released in 2017, shortly before he died.
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But Jackson also grew familiar with the other side of the law.: Another of his uncles was a police chief in Miami, while a third was a detective and his only brother was a police agent infiltrated in the streets of Baltimore, before being sent to Iraq during the 2003 war.
You hinder Trump
Jackson’s best-known sentences came when she was a judge in federal court in Washington: In 2018, she invalidated a plan by then-President Trump to make it easier to lay off public-sector workers.
“Presidents are not kings”he proclaimed in another famous ruling in which he decided that Trump could not prevent a former White House lawyer, Don McGahn, from testifying about the “Russian plot” before Congress.
In 2019, he blocked a Trump plan to expand express exports of undocumented immigrants, although that same year he allowed the president to dodge environmental regulations to build the wall with Mexico, believing that the issue was outside his jurisdiction.
The magistrate has been married for 26 years to the surgeon Patrick Jackson, from whom she adopted the last name without completely detaching herself from her parents’, Brown.
They both have two daughters: Talia, 21, and Leila, 17. In 2016, after the death of Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, the youngest of them sent a letter to then-President Barack Obama and asked him to nominate his mother to the Supreme. Six years later, her wish has come true.
EFE
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