Loud and clear: New Justice Jackson speaks volumes at bench
Ketanji Brown Jackson said before the Supreme Court's term began that she was “ready to work.”
WASHINGTON (AP) — Ketanji Brown Jackson, the first Black woman on the Supreme Court and its newest justice, said before the term began that she was “ready to work.” She made that clear during arguments in the opening cases.
The tally: 4,568 words spoken over nearly six hours this past week, about 50% more than any of the eight other justices, according to Adam Feldman, the creator of the Empirical SCOTUS blog.
At one point, she spoke uninterrupted for more than three and a half minutes to lay out her understanding of the history of the post-Civil War 14th Amendment to the Constitution guaranteeing formerly enslaved people equal rights. Jackson's statement ran three transcript pages, the longest Feldman could remember ever seeing.
“I can’t think of a time where you’ve seen a junior justice take hold of the arguments” to the same extent, Feldman said using the court’s shorthand title for the newest justice.
A jurist with a liberal record, Jackson joined a court where conservatives hold a 6-3 advantage, so in many of the most most contentious cases her vote likely does not matter to the outcome. But her performance during arguments seemed to show she intends to make herself heard.
In three of the four cases the court heard this past week, she was the most active speaker among the justices.
Feldman said new justices usually sit back and take things in but “poke their heads up occasionally” to ask a question. “This was a different approach," he said.
By the end of arguments, she had probed the meaning of the word “adjacent," asked whether a marsh in a 1985 case was “visually indistinguishable from the abutting creek" and prefaced another question by saying: "Let me try to bring some enlightenment to it by asking it this way."
Justices themselves have acknowledged it takes time to get used to sitting on the highest court in the land. Justice Elena Kagan once compared starting the job to “ drinking out of a fire hose ” with a learning curve that “is extremely steep, sometimes it seems vertical.” Some justices have said it takes five years to feel really comfortable in the role.
In her Library of Congress appearance, Jackson talked about the attention on her as the first Black woman to be a justice. People approach her with “what I can only describe as a profound sense of pride and what feels to me like renewed ownership," she said.
Their message to her is “in essence, ‘You go, girl,”’ Jackson said. “They're saying ‘Invisible no more. We see you and we are with you.’”
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