Why Does Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson’s Nomination to the Supreme Court Matter
Because it’s time we evened the scales
President Biden made the promise to nominate a Black woman to the Supreme Court back when he was still campaigning in 2020. He had already fulfilled one promise by choosing Vice President Harris as his running mate, a historic decision that made Harris the first female, first Black, and first person of South Asian descent to hold the position of Vice President. With both campaign promises, Biden received mostly positive responses, but some took issue, saying, “Why not pick the most qualified person, why bring race and gender into the discussion?”
So why does it matter that Biden nominated Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson to the highest court in the land? There are a lot of reasons, let’s break them down:
For the first 186 years of the United States’ history, the only people considered for Judgeship were white men. Judge Elizabeth Lane was the first female judge in the U.S and was appointed in 1962. Justice Thurgood Marshall became the first black judge in the U.S in 1967.
Despite women making up approximately 50 percent of law school classes, only 36 percent of federal court judges are women, and only 7 percent are Black.
Women make up 50.8 percent of the country’s population and are disproportionally represented at every level of the judiciary.
It’s time we even the scales
Federal judges have lifetime appointments and have the ability to establish common law that can define generations. However, the current composition of our federal court system lacks the legitimacy of accurate representation- and not just in race and gender, although both are important. Every individual in the world has a skewed version of the world. Having a different upbringing, different experiences, different gender, different races, different cultures, all contribute to how we view the world and other people. Court Judges are not immune to this- even legislative interpretations are filtered through a judge’s personal history to some degree. That’s why the Supreme Court is so often split- because so often there is more than one answer and more than one way of looking at a case. Having more than one point of view in the room can never be a bad thing. Multiple opinions lead to debate, which leads to growth, which leads to change.
A homogeneous court system has the potential to create equity in judicial rulings, and improve trust in the legal system. Judges that have commonalities with the people who come before their bench are more likely to empathize. The Center for American Progress noted that on cases where minority issues are not the focus, female and minority judges rule nearly the same as their male or white counterparts. There is no difference in rulings. But when it comes to cases in which someone has been discriminated against for their race, gender, etc., female and minority judges’ backgrounds are more likely to inform their decision making, and be aware of subtleties in the case that others might miss.
In the United States, we have a specific ethos when it comes to merit- we call it the American Dream. We believe in “pulling yourself up by the bootstraps” and that if you work hard enough, you will succeed. This is why programs such as affirmative action, and why Biden’s commitment to selecting a Black female running mate and Supreme Court nominee, have received so much backlash. Because if they deserved it, they would earn their position without the need to fill a quota or “appeal to the woke agenda”- it is seen as giving an unfair advantage to the minority groups who benefit.
I am certain that politics and image went into picking Sonya Sotomayor, Condoleezza Rice, Ruth Bader Ginsberg, Amy Comey Barret, Elana Kagen, and Sandra Day O’Connor for their roles. The only difference with Judge Johnson’s nomination is that President Biden made it clear from the get-go he was narrowing his search. Since the United States became a country, we have had 115 Supreme Court Justices. Only six of them have been women. It appears that the opponents of Biden’s declaration believe that he is overlooking legitimate qualifications in favor of gender and race in picking Judge Johnson, which implies that Judge Johnson is not qualified for the job and could not be less true. Judge Johnson attended Harvard for both undergraduate and law school where she served as editor of the Harvard Law Review. She clerked for Justice Breyer of the Supreme Court and has served as a district court judge for 7 years before being nominated for the appellate court in 2021.
Descriptive representation- at all levels of government- is not a “nice to have”. It’s a need to have. Our history shows us that the de facto choice when it comes to judicial nominations is a white male. So until we get to the point where nominating a Black woman to the Supreme Court doesn’t have news headlines a determiner like first, second, or third, and is instead commonplace, I’m ok with presidents intentionally nominating with race and gender in mind. After all, they’ve been doing it for white men for over two hundred years.
