The United States of America crafted a watershed chapter in its judicial history on Friday when Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson entered the hallowed portals of the Supreme Court, indeed the first Black woman confirmed to the apex judiciary, following Thursday’s 53-47 vote by the Senate.
Over time, the Supreme Court has become more diverse and decidedly more conservative than it has been since the 1930s. This is the crucial change that Justice Jackson will have to countenance at the threshold. In the immediate perspective, she will be presiding over critical cases, some of which are riveted to the role of race in college admissions and voting rights that the Court, with its 6-3 conservative majority, will take up very shortly.
However, Justice Jackson will not join the court for several months, at any rate not before Justice Stephen Breyer retires. But this will happen only after the court wraps up its work for the summer, pre-eminently its verdict on whether to overturn the landmark Roe vs Wade ruling on abortion rights. When Justice Jackson takes the Bench for the first time in October, she will be one of America’s four women and two Black judges.
Markedly, the nine-member court will as a whole be younger than it has been for nearly 30 years, when Justice Breyer, now 83, was elevated. Among the younger judges are three appointees of President Donald Trump. The court’s diversity is historical, but this will not obscure its seemingly conservative tilt. During Justice Breyer’s final term, the conservative justices had already left their mark even before deciding major cases on abortion, guns (yet to be outlawed), religion and climate change.
As regards the last, there is as yet no international consensus save occasional statements of intent. The Supreme Court had allowed an unusual Texas law, that bans abortion after six weeks, to remain in force. Furthermore, the court had stopped the Biden administration from engaging a large workforce that is vaccinated against Covid-19 or to be masked and tested. It had retained the redrawn Alabama congressional districts that a lower court ~ with two Trump appointees ~ found shortchanged Black voters in violation of federal law.
Justice Jackson’s replacement of Breyer, for whom she once worked as a law clerk, is unlikely to alter the Supreme Court’s calculus. As Robin Walker Sterling, a North-western University professor of law has remarked: “She’s just going to be swimming against the tide each day. That’s a lot to take on”. That said, Justice Jackson’s presence could make a difference to the perspective she brings and how she expresses herself in her observations.
It is likely that she will evaluate the cases on race from the prism of being a Black woman who grew up in the South. She has an opportunity to show how representation matters. It really does in the United States today where racist violence ~ even brutal killings by white policemen ~ are endemic. The appointment of a Black judge in the Supreme Court must be conspicuous in refreshing contrast.