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Could President Biden’s Supreme Court nominee, assuming her confirmation, inspire any of her new colleagues to see the world in a different way?
There doesn’t seem to be a Sandra Day O’Connor lurking within today’s carefully constructed conservative supermajority, and the heroic trajectory of Thurgood Marshall’s life is not Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson’s story. It’s fair to say that she has more in common with the justice she has been named to replace. Like Stephen Breyer, she was a star student at an excellent public high school. Her father, like his, worked as a lawyer for a big-city school board (Miami in her case, San Francisco in his). Success at Harvard Law School propelled them both to a Supreme Court clerkship (in fact, she clerked for him). Justice Breyer is often referred to as the father of the federal sentencing guidelines and served on the original United States Sentencing Commission, where she later served as vice chair.
In drawing these parallels, I have deliberately not emphasized race. Yes, her nomination fulfills the president’s campaign promise to appoint a Black woman, the first to sit on the Supreme Court. While that’s cause for celebration, it shouldn’t obscure the other kinds of diversity she would bring to the court.
Diversity has many dimensions, perspective among them. That she would be the first former public defender to sit on the court has received wide notice, less so the fact that as a public school graduate she would be a rarity among the justices. Justice Breyer’s departure will leave only two, Elena Kagan, who attended the highly selective Hunter College High School in Manhattan, hardly a typical public school, and Samuel Alito, who went to Steinert High School in Hamilton Township, N.J., near Trenton, his hometown. Every other member of the court is a graduate of a Catholic high school, a striking but little-observed fact at a time when cases concerning public and religious schools and the relationship between the two are prominent on the court’s docket.
Justice Breyer’s wife, Joanna, is a clinical psychologist who during her active career specialized in working with children being treated for cancer at the Lahey Clinic in Boston. Does having a medical professional in the family account for Justice Breyer’s emphasis on facts and evidence in his opinions on medical subjects? With medical questions hardly about to disappear from the court’s docket, it’s worth noting that Judge Jackson’s husband, Patrick, is a surgeon. (Justice Sonia Sotomayor’s brother, Juan, is a doctor with an allergy practice in upstate New York.) Some conservative justices seem to assume that doctors don’t act in the interest of their patients, whether performing abortions or administering vaccines. Maybe Judge Jackson will be able to persuade them otherwise.