WASHINGTON (AP) — Ketanji Brown Jackson, the first black woman on the Supreme Court and its newest judge, said she was “ready to work” before the term began. She made that clear during pleadings in the opening cases.
The total: 4,568 words spoken for nearly six hours over the past week, about 50% more than any of the eight other judges, according to Adam Feldman, the creator of the Empirical SCOTUS blog.
The judges as a whole are generally a garrulous gang, questioning lawyers in quick succession. For now, Jackson’s approach is less like Judge Clarence Thomas, who once went 10 years without asking a questionand more like Judge Neil Gorsuch, who was one of the more active questioners in his first year.
On Tuesday, in a case that could weaken the historic Voting Rights Actwho tried bar racial discrimination in votingJackson was particularly vocal.
At one point, she spoke for more than three and a half minutes uninterrupted to explain her understanding of the history of the 14th Amendment to the Constitution after the Civil War, giving previously enslaved people equal rights. Jackson’s statement ran three transcription pagesthe tallest Feldman he’d ever seen.
“I can’t think of a time when you’ve seen a junior judge pick up the arguments” to the same extent, Feldman said, using the court’s shorthand title for the latest justice.
Jackson, a lawyer with a liberal past, joined a court where conservatives hold a 6-3 lead, so in many of the most controversial cases, her vote probably doesn’t matter for the outcome. But her performance during fights seemed to show that she intended to make herself heard.
“I’m sitting at the table now and I’m ready to work,” she said last week at a performance at the Library of Congress follow her ceremonial inauguration at the Supreme Court.
In three of the four cases the court heard last week, she was the most active speaker among the judges.
Feldman said new judges usually sit back and take things in, but “occasionally raise their heads” to ask a question. “This was a different approach,” he said.
Monday was court opening day and Jackson’s first on the Supreme Court bench. The judges spent about five minutes in their interrogation in what turned out to be a fight of almost two hours in a dispute over the nation’s major anti-water pollution law when Jackson asked her first question; she was the fourth judge to do so.
By the end of the arguments, she had researched the meaning of the word ‘adjacent’, asked whether a swamp in a 1985 case was ‘visually indistinguishable from the adjacent creek’, and prefaced another question by saying, ‘ Let me try to bring some relief by asking this way.”
Jackson was confirmed in April but didn’t take her place until the court went into summer recess in June, giving her months to study cases the court had assigned. Other judges spent part of that time finalizing opinions in cases containing decisions overthrowing the historic Roe v. Wade abortion rights case and extend gun rights.
Speaking at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in early April, days before Jackson was confirmed, Judge Amy Comey Barrett noted that “luckily will be some lead time” for the new judge to ease her role. Barrett on the other hand heard her first arguments a week after they was confirmed. Justice Brett Kavanaugh was sworn in on a Saturday and heard his first argument the following Tuesday.
Judges themselves have acknowledged that it takes time to get used to sitting on the highest court in the country. Judge Elena Kagan once compared starting the job to “ drink from a fire hose ‘ with a learning curve that is ‘extremely steep, sometimes it seems vertical’. Some judges have said it takes five years to really feel comfortable in the role.
In her Library of Congress appearance, Jackson spoke of drawing attention to her as the first black woman to be a justice. People approach her with “what I can only describe as a deep sense of pride and what feels like new ownership to me,” she said.
Their message to her is “essentially, ‘go, girl,’” Jackson said. “They say, ‘No more invisible. We see you and we are with you.’”
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