Biden Nominates Ketanji Brown Jackson For Supreme Court Becoming The First Black Woman To Serve As Justice

President Biden will nominate Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson to fill a vacancy on the Supreme Court, the first Black woman nominated to be a justice on the nation’s highest court, according to people familiar with the decision.

Judge Jackson, 51 years old, serves on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, one of the nation’s most influential courts and often a steppingstone for Supreme Court justices. She joined that court last June after eight years as a federal trial judge in the nation’s capital, where she wrote more than 550 opinions, including one from 2019 in which she ruled former White House counsel Don McGahn didn’t have absolute immunity from having to testify in a congressional investigation of then-President Donald Trump.

Mr. Biden offered to nominate Judge Jackson to the court in a phone call on Thursday evening and she accepted, according to one of the people.

If confirmed by the Senate, Judge Jackson would replace Justice Stephen Breyer, a member of the court’s liberal wing who announced in January that he would retire at the end of the court’s current term. The nominee served as a law clerk to Justice Breyer early in her career.

Mr. Biden’s nomination won’t change the balance of power on a conservative high court that has six justices appointed by Republican presidents, including three by former President Donald Trump.

A simple majority in the Senate is needed to confirm a high-court nominee. The Senate is split 50-50, but Democrats wield control because Vice President Kamala Harris serves as a tiebreaking vote.

Mr. Biden has said he would nominate a Black woman for the vacancy, saying such a move was long overdue. His announcement will come on the two-year anniversary of him first making that pledge, which came during a debate in South Carolina. The state, where Black voters play a pivotal role in state politics, helped revitalize Mr. Biden’s flagging presidential campaign and put him on the path to win the Democratic nomination.

The White House and Republican leaders have both tried to set the stage for a less contentious process than the battles during the Trump administration, though entrenched disagreements continue to exist between the two parties on the legal philosophy a Supreme Court justice should embrace.

Judge Jackson was part of the administration’s first slate of judicial nominations last year. The Senate confirmed her to the D.C. Circuit in June on a vote of 53-44, with support from all 50 members of the Democratic caucus and Republican Sens. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, Susan Collins of Maine and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska.

Her nomination to the Supreme Court is part of a broader push by Mr. Biden to diversify the federal judiciary, in terms of race, ethnicity, gender and professional experience. Of the nearly 50 life-tenured judges Mr. Biden has placed on the federal courts so far, three-quarters have been women, and two-thirds have been people of color.

Judge Jackson previously served as an assistant federal public defender and as the vice chairwoman of the U.S. Sentencing Commission, an independent agency which provides sentencing guidelines for the federal courts.

In 2011, she and other commissioners voted to retroactively apply a new law easing penalties for possession of crack cocaine. At the meeting taking up the vote, she spoke at length at what she described as the gross injustice of the prior policy of treating offenders trafficking in powder cocaine more leniently.

On Washington’s federal trial court, Judge Jackson saw a steady diet of routine matters but also handled the occasional high profile case, including several involving the Trump administration.

In 2019, she blocked the administration from expanding a policy known as expedited removal that allows the government to quickly deport immigrants who crossed the border illegally without involving immigration courts. The decision was reversed on appeal by the D.C. Circuit, which said federal law gives the president “unreviewable discretion” to shorten and speed up the deportation process.

In a different case that same year, Judge Jackson threw out a lawsuit by conservation groups that sought to block construction of a proposed border wall through protected federal lands in New Mexico, saying Congress had precluded judicial review of the project.

The judge handled a closely watched business case in 2013, rejecting the meat industry when it brought a free-speech challenge to a U.S. Department of Agriculture regulation requiring companies to disclose country-of-origin information about their meat products. She was affirmed on appeal.

Because Judge Jackson only joined the D.C. Circuit appeals court last summer, she has a short record there so far. She replaced Merrick Garland after he left the judiciary to become attorney general.

Judge Jackson was born in Washington, D.C., to two public school teachers, who moved her family to the Miami area when she was a child. Her parents, she said, named her “Ketanji Onyika” to express pride in their African ancestry. Her father would later become an attorney with the Miami-Dade County School Board and her mother a principal at a public magnet school.

Judge Jackson graduated from Harvard-Radcliffe College magna cum laude in 1992 and from Harvard Law School in 1996, where she was a supervising editor for its law review.

She and her husband, Patrick Jackson, a surgeon at MedStar Georgetown University Hospital in Washington, have two daughters.
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