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U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, increasingly known for her blistering dissenting court opinions in the Trump era, told an Indianapolis crowd Thursday that she is “not afraid” to use her voice.
The comment drew applause from many of the 1,000 attendees at an Indianapolis Bar Association luncheon at the Indiana Convention Center, where Brown was promoting her new book, “Lovely One,” a memoir chronicling her life story from childhood to becoming the first Black woman on the Supreme Court.
Just Tuesday, Jackson was the court’s lone dissenter in an 8-1 ruling that allowed Trump to continue his mass layoffs of federal government workers, a move that Jackson described in her written opinion as unleashing the president’s “wrecking ball.”
“At bottom, this case is about whether that action amounts to a structural overhaul that usurps Congress’s policymaking prerogatives — and it is hard to imagine deciding that question in any meaningful way after those changes have happened,” Jackson wrote in her dissent. “Yet, for some reason, this Court sees fit to step in now and release the President’s wrecking ball at the outset of this litigation.”
At Thursday’s luncheon, Jackson explained that there are times when she feels compelled to include additional thoughts in her dissents when a particular issue is important to her.
“It’s because I feel like I might have something to offer and something to add,” she said.
Jane Magnus-Stinson, senior judge for the U.S. District Court in Indianapolis, interviewed Jackson for the crowd and asked her whether responses from her colleagues ever hurt her feelings.
The question appeared to be a reference to the kind of harsh criticism Jackson received last month after she issued a dissent in the case of Trump v. Casa, which partially lifted nationwide injunctions against Trump’s executive order to end birthright citizenship.
Jackson, part of the court’s liberal minority, wrote that she has “no doubt that, if judges must allow the Executive to act unlawfully in some circumstances, as the Court concludes today, executive lawlessness will flourish because of the decision” and that, eventually, “executive power will become completely uncontainable.”
This drew a swift response from Justice Amy Coney Barrett, who accused Jackson of a “startling line of attack that is tethered neither to [precedent and the Constitution] nor, frankly, to any doctrine whatsoever.”
Jackson showed no hurt feelings on Thursday.
“My parents gave to me a sense of my own ability to write and to speak out and to say what I have to say and to not be really offended by other people saying what they have to say,” Jackson said. “I actually don’t get my feelings hurt. What I do is I try to respond as effectively as I can.”
The luncheon discussion also allowed Jackson to take the audience deeper into her recently published memoir.
Jackson opened the program with a reading from her memoir, leading the audience to the moment she was sworn onto the Supreme Court after being nominated by President Joe Biden. From there, Jackson highlighted her family’s history in the Jim Crow South to her legal career, with stops along the way to share stories about her college years at Harvard, where she found new ways to view her purpose.
When a student at Harvard decided to hang a Confederate flag from their dorm window for all to see, Jackson and her fellow students at the Black Students Association took to addressing the situation. From making flyers to attempting to reach the university president, Jackson was trying to get something done.
“It was a pretty difficult time for a lot of Black students who already felt a little bit out of place, but to come to a place and then be made to feel other, in this way, was tough,” Jackson said. “But I also noticed that we were taking a lot of time out of our study, and out of our work, to address this situation.”
At one of the association’s next meetings, Jackson brought up one of her favorite quotes by Toni Morrison, the first African-American woman to win the Nobel Prize in literature: “The function, the very serious function of racism is distraction. It keeps you from doing your work.”
“I mentioned this, and talked with a lot of my friends, and really tried to make sure that we weren’t impeding our ability to do the work, which was exactly what the person who had the flag would want for us to do,” Jackson said. “It was a big kind of turning point in the way that I view my purpose, which is to stay as focused as I can on the work that I was called to do.”
Jackson encouraged those in attendance, specifically law students, to network and take opportunities when they’re given, especially clerkships.
“I always, always attempt to encourage law students to apply to clerkships,” she said. “It can be any clerkship. It can be any judge. Just get the experience of having worked for them, and also you develop a mentor-mentee relationship that will be there for you professionally throughout your career, also extremely significant.”
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