2026-10-19T09:00:45.278Z / https://www.cnn.com/2026/10/19/politics/ketanji-brown-jackson-tenure-supreme-court
过去两年来，凯坦吉·布朗·杰克逊大法官在图书巡回宣传活动中的曝光度几乎与她在最高法院的工作不相上下。她讲述了自己的个人奋斗与职业成就，并强调自己是“祖先梦想”的化身。
今年夏天，她与前第一夫人米歇尔·奥巴马以及米歇尔的弟弟克雷格·罗宾逊一同参与了热门的“IMO”播客节目。罗宾逊将杰克逊称为最高法院首位非裔女性大法官，并举起了她的新书《可爱之人》（Lovely One）。
但就在此时，罗宾逊口误说道：“那个孤独之人”（The Lonely One）。
这个短暂的口误——他随后腼腆地纠正了自己——比主持人可能意识到的更精准地诠释了杰克逊。如今即将迎来她在最高法院的第五个任期，杰克逊在行事风格和法律实质问题上都采取了与同僚们截然不同的立场，这在许多方面让她与同事们渐行渐远。与此同时，她正在重塑大法官们如何援引历史来解释宪法的方式。
杰克逊打破了法院内部的惯例，在口头辩论环节占用了远超合理比例的时间，这让习惯了在问答环节更为克制的同僚们感到明显的不适。她直言不讳地质疑保守派大法官们的公正性，尤其是在他们站在白宫一边的时候。她的自由派同僚们拒绝在她最尖锐的意见上联名。
在今年8月有关邮寄选票的争议中，她大胆断言最高法院多数派在与特朗普相关的选举诉讼中可能走向何方。她指责保守派“戴着有色眼镜看待本届政府”，并宣称：“多数派忽视了政府的真实目的：为其在11月选举前煽动混乱的行为寻求我们的认可。”
去年，当最高法院多数派允许特朗普政府扣留美国国立卫生研究院 awarded 的近8亿美元研究拨款时，杰克逊写道：“这是变了味的卡尔文球式司法。卡尔文球只有一条规则：没有固定规则。我们这里似乎有两条：一条是这条，另一条是本届政府总能胜诉。”
CNN采访了20多名密切关注杰克逊在最高法院工作的人士，其中包括仰慕者、批评者和密友。与杰克逊或其他大法官关系最密切的人士因个人评价的性质而要求匿名。就连自由派内部也存在分歧，他们就杰克逊的行事方式——尤其是她公开抨击保守派公正性的做法——是否会造成疏远并适得其反展开了争论。
与杰克逊关系最密切的人士表示，她并非没有意识到自己引发的反感。他们说，她是在有意为之，她向法庭之外的听众发声，强调她所认为的对民主的威胁。
这种倾向一直困扰着法院圈子里的人。然而，多年来其他大法官也曾打破各种惯例，引发过各自的公众审视。一些支持者认为，杰克逊遭到批评仅仅是因为她是公众生活中的非裔女性，这一观点在她2022年参议院确认听证会上就已出现。
更重要的是在法律层面，杰克逊在宪法解读方式上与其他大法官划清了界限。她的使命是用自己独特的视角——关于宪法条款在通过时被如何理解——来对抗保守派多数派的“原旨主义”立场。她提请人们注意非裔美国人在宪法重建修正案历史中的作用。
这一点在最近6月一份围绕第14修正案的意见书中体现得最为明显，当时多数派否决了特朗普限制出生公民权的举措。
“在第14修正案批准前的几十年里，非裔美国人在全国范围内组织并参加了600多次地方和全国性会议，”她在协同意见书中写道。“代表们在此为第14修正案，以及后来更广泛的黑人民权运动搭建了政治和知识框架。”
杰克逊显然将目光投向了未来的最高法院——一个她不会再是9人法庭中仅有的3名自由派大法官之一的未来。
“你会想到那些最终会同意你观点的人，”这位56岁的大法官在今年5月谈及自己的异议意见时说道。
这种态度与已故大法官安东宁·斯卡利亚或现任大法官克拉伦斯·托马斯颇为相似。他们二人都曾在法律的小众领域精心打磨异议意见，随着保守主义在各级司法机构不断取得进展，他们的影响力也日益增强。
“她知道自己在许多案件中都无法胜诉，”芝加哥-肯特法学院的卡罗琳·夏皮罗教授说道。“但她也预计自己将在最高法院任职很长时间。从这些方面来看，她与斯卡利亚大法官和托马斯大法官并无太大不同。他们一直坚持自己的立场。他们当时倡导的许多观点如今已成为法律。”
曾在1986年任职至2016年去世的斯卡利亚，以及1991年上任并仍在任职的托马斯，他们的右翼观点曾被视为激进之举，例如反对长期存在的堕胎权和根深蒂固的枪支管制。如今这类观点占据了主导地位，这得益于一系列志同道合的任命，其中三人来自特朗普的第一任期。
“当她使用‘卡尔文球’这样的词汇时，”曾与杰克逊一样担任过斯蒂芬·布雷耶大法官的法律助理的夏皮罗补充道，“她不只是在对同僚讲话。她也是在对公众讲话。”
杰克逊的强硬态度在一定程度上可以追溯到她所处的环境。
2022年，由时任总统乔·拜登任命，接替退休的布雷耶大法官，杰克逊是几十年来首位加入如此一边倒的保守派最高法院的自由派大法官。（保守派的超级多数地位在特朗普2020年任命艾米·科尼·巴雷特接替去世的自由派大法官露丝·巴德·金斯伯格后正式确立。）
在此之前，即使自由派处于少数派，左翼也有四票可靠的支持票，只需再说服一名中间派右翼大法官就能获胜。曾一度至关重要的中间派——多年来时而向左倾斜，时而向右倾斜——如今已几乎消失殆尽。
杰克逊资历更深的自由派同僚索尼娅·索托马约尔和埃琳娜·卡根分别于2009年和2010年上任，她们在任职的大部分时间里都在5:4的多数派格局中周旋。尽管她们曾谴责右翼裁决，但在同僚中仍继续采取更具策略性的做法，试图达成某种共识。
“这是几十年来首位采取大胆立场的左翼大法官，”总部位于华盛顿的进步组织正义法律策略中心的乔恩·格林鲍姆告诉CNN。“杰克逊大法官在许多这类案件中并不在意是否能凑够五票。”
杰克逊的言辞让人想起保守派偶像斯卡利亚，他那些引人注目的贬损和讽刺旁白确保了他的异议观点能广泛传播——即便这些言论疏远了同僚。
其他新任命的大法官也曾以各种方式彰显个性，例如拒绝将自己的法律助理纳入集体筛选 incoming 请愿书的“cert池”，或是在与同僚的交往中特立独行。2017年上任之初，大法官尼尔·戈萨奇对待其他大法官的语气让一些评论员认为他是一个自命不凡的惯例破坏者。
“他就像班里总是举手的新学生，操场上那个不按规则抢球的男孩，”琳达·格林豪斯在《纽约时报》中评价戈萨奇。“他在同僚面前直言不讳地指出他们的错误，他那尖酸刻薄的语气充满了对那些或许确实懂行的人的不尊重。”
戈萨奇接替了以诸多怪癖和独特法律哲学著称的斯卡利亚。
斯卡利亚对2015年最高法院多数派宣布同性婚姻权的裁决极为愤怒，曾有一段时间拒绝与同僚共进午餐。退休大法官安东尼·肯尼迪在去年的回忆录中透露，斯卡利亚在2015年6月的裁决后几乎不与他说话，直到2016年2月去世前不久才和解。
拓展最高法院对历史的认知
大多数保守派大法官都采用斯卡利亚普及的原旨主义方法，或多或少地依据他们所认为的宪法保障条款在通过时的公众理解来进行解读。
杰克逊试图扩大应被考量的观点群体范围。
“她将这样一种理念带到了最高法院：如果我们要着眼于文本和历史，我们就必须审视全体公众以及边缘化社区的观点，”宪法问责中心的大卫·甘斯说道。“这改变了动态，尽管她只有一票，而且经常处于异议立场。”
图罗法学院教授蒂芙尼·格雷厄姆表示，她对非裔美国人历史记录的重视在她的第一个任期就已显现，当时最高法院推翻了旨在提升高等教育多样性的基于种族的政策。
“她不只是在谈论基于种族的平权行动是合宪的，”格雷厄姆在谈到杰克逊的异议立场时说道。“她在阐述重建时期的历史以及当时向前奴隶承诺的内容。她暗示，当第14修正案的目的之一是保障前奴隶的权利时，你不可能连贯地谈论种族中立。”
在那个涉及哈佛大学和北卡罗来纳大学的案件中，杰克逊驳斥了多数派对“色盲”宪法的坚持。
“我们国家从未做到过色盲，”杰克逊写道。她是继托马斯和瑟古德·马歇尔（1967年至1991年任职）之后的第三位非裔大法官。她提到了“至今仍困扰着我们公民的、有据可查的代际不平等传递”。
今年早些时候，当最高法院依据第14修正案否决了特朗普限制出生公民权的计划时，杰克逊特别提及了那个时代非裔美国人的经历。
在她协同意见书的一部分中，她提到了“有色人种会议代表”，以及他们对“普遍自由和平等利益”的承诺，这一承诺将惠及所有在美国领土上出生的人。
她还特别批评了托马斯的观点，即第14修正案的公民条款是为解放奴隶而制定的，因此不会阻止特朗普对非公民父母所生的在美子女实施限制。
托马斯没有专门提及杰克逊，但他在谈到多数派时说道：“最高法院为第14修正案的悲惨历史添砖加瓦。该修正案的设计和初衷是为了保障解放黑人的平等权利，但如今却被重新用于重建国会从未支持过的政治项目。”
（杰克逊拒绝了CNN的采访请求。托马斯没有回应与杰克逊相关的问题。）
杰克逊替代性的宪法解释方法在一系列案件中都有所体现。2025年，当多数派限制下级法院法官对可能违宪的总统行动发布全国性禁令的权力时，杰克逊与艾米·科尼·巴雷特大法官产生了分歧。巴雷特的多数派意见回溯了英国大法官法庭的惯例。
“因此，我们必须询问，全国性禁令是否与‘宪法通过和最初司法法案制定之时英国大法官法庭所发布的救济’足够‘类似’，”巴雷特写道。“答案是否定的：在建国之时，英国大法官法庭既没有全国性禁令，也没有任何类似形式的救济。”
杰克逊与其他自由派大法官一同持异议，签署了索托马约尔的声明。但随后她又撰写了一份单独的意见：“美利坚合众国的建国者们明确拒绝了国王统治一切、包括法院在内的所有人都隶属于他的治理体系。在我们这个以宪法为核心的体系中，人民是统治者，我们实行法治。因此，参考英国法院与国王的关系来指导我国司法部门与行政部门之间的权力关系，几乎是毫无意义的。”
巴雷特对杰克逊的观点不屑一顾，断言：“我们不会深究杰克逊大法官的论点，这与两百多年的先例背道而驰，更不用说宪法本身了。我们只想指出这一点：杰克逊大法官在谴责帝国式行政部门的同时，却拥抱了帝国式司法部门。”
杰克逊在自由派阵营之外额外撰写异议意见的做法打破了惯例。过去，自由派异议者通常会签署由其中资深大法官起草的一份强有力的意见书。已故大法官金斯伯格在作为左翼资深大法官时，尤其坚持“我撰写，你签署”的惯例。卡根大法官一直遵循索托马约尔的指派，不单独撰写异议意见。
在涉及特朗普政策的全国性禁令争议的一年前，最高法院审理了一个更重要的考验总统权力的案件。首席大法官罗伯茨撰写的多数派意见赋予了特朗普免受刑事起诉的实质性豁免权，并强化了行政部门的“决定性和排他性”权力。
索托马约尔撰写了主要的异议意见，长达30页，措辞尖锐，卡根和杰克逊都签署了该意见。
杰克逊坚持要补充更多内容：“尽可能简洁地解释，多数派今天到底对美国总统问责制的范式做出了怎样的改变。”她还将多数派的立场比作“五级火警”，并嘲讽了罗伯茨所谓的“伪装的司法谦卑”。
罗伯茨在其意见中回应了两份异议意见，尤其嘲讽杰克逊的意见是“自行杜撰的模型和范式”。
杰克逊也没有放过对自由派同僚的批评，有时会指责他们妥协。有一次发生在2024年爱达荷州一起涉及堕胎权的争议中，索托马约尔和卡根与巴雷特、罗伯茨以及布雷特·卡瓦诺大法官站在了一起。
该案发生在最高法院多数派推翻了近半个世纪的堕胎权保护两年后，当时多数派似乎准备进一步限制堕胎权，特别是在急诊室的情况。争议的焦点是拜登政府涵盖公立医院急诊室的政策，该政策在孕妇出现并发症需要通过手术进行稳定治疗时，优先于州堕胎禁令。
关于医生何时可以进行紧急堕胎存在一些事实差异，这 arguably 值得将案件发回下级法院审理，而关键大法官们协商后决定驳回此案。
杰克逊在异议中写道：“最高法院现在才打出一杆进洞，只是告诉下级法院继续当作什么都没发生，这太少太晚了……现在根本没有充分的理由不立即解决这场冲突。”
只不过她的自由派同僚认为有充分的理由。如果全面审理此案的是非曲直，他们可能会在另一场堕胎权争议中败诉。相反，结果是自由派取得了部分胜利。
在与奥巴马和罗宾逊的对话中，杰克逊情绪高涨。她向他们讲述了自己的童年、高中辩论比赛的成功、在哈佛大学结识未来丈夫的经历，所有这些都与她一加入最高法院就开始撰写的回忆录相关。该书于2024年出版，根据她的财务披露表格，截至目前她已从中赚取了超过400万美元。
杰克逊在2022年被任命前曾在美国地区法院和上诉法院任职，在其他场合她则变得更为严肃，比如去年在印第安纳波利斯的一次法律会议上。当被问及什么让她夜不能寐时，她说：“我们的民主状况。”她在写作中明确表示，她认为特朗普政府是必须不断加以谴责的严重威胁。
（就特朗普而言，这位经常贬低非裔女性的前总统在今年4月将杰克逊称为“那个新来的、智商低下的人，不知怎么就爬上了法官席”。）
关于最高法院的工作生活，杰克逊告诉听众，大法官们之间关系融洽，已经学会“在不恶语相向的情况下持不同意见”。
最高法院新任期预计的关键案件
https://www.cnn.com/
任何小团体的动态都有其个人差异和怪癖。今年早些时候，首席大法官罗伯茨在一次司法会议上表示，他正试图缩短大法官们的口头辩论时间，因为这些辩论“耗时过长”。罗伯茨没有点名杰克逊，但自她上任以来，她一直是导致庭审时间延长的主要原因。（在2026-27届开庭期的第一个月，包括杰克逊在内的所有大法官似乎都更注意控制时间了。）
罗伯茨表明，他知道如何在同僚之间周旋，处理大大小小的分歧。
有时候可能是“小事”，他去年在乔治敦法学院的一次活动中说道。
“我的意思是，如果你坐在某人旁边，就是无法忍受他或她那种敲椅子的方式，你会想，‘好吧，我们还要在这里待20年。’你知道，我必须决定，是要告诉她别这么做，还是就这么忍了，或者还有别的什么办法？”
Why Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson goes it alone
2026-10-19T09:00:45.278Z / https://www.cnn.com/2026/10/19/politics/ketanji-brown-jackson-tenure-supreme-court
Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson over the past two years has been nearly as visible on the book circuit as she has been at the Supreme Court, recounting her personal struggles and professional successes and emphasizing that she is the embodiment of her “ancestors’ dreams.”
As she joined former first lady Michelle Obama and her brother Craig Robinson for their popular “IMO” podcast this summer, Robinson referred to Jackson as the first African American woman on the court and held up her book, “Lovely One.”
But as he did, Robinson mistakenly said, “The Lonely One.”
The momentary blip — he sheepishly corrected himself — captured Jackson more than her hosts likely realized.
Now entering her fifth term on the Supreme Court, Jackson has taken an approach that in many ways has isolated her from her colleagues — stylistically and on the substance of the law. At the same time, she is reframing how the justices might look to the past to interpret the Constitution.
Jackson has bucked internal court norms and consumed disproportionate time during oral-arguments, producing a palpable chill from colleagues used to more solicitude during the Q-and-A. She has bluntly challenged the integrity of the conservative justices as they have sided with the White House. Her fellow liberals have declined to sign onto her most lacerating opinions.
In an August controversy over mail-in ballots, she made a bold assertion about where the court majority might be headed in Trump-related election litigation. She faulted conservatives for “a blinders-on approach” to the administration and declared, “the majority misses the Government’s actual objective: to secure our imprimatur for its effort to foment chaos ahead of the November elections.”
When the majority last year let the Trump administration block nearly $800 million in research grants awarded by the National Institutes of Health, Jackson wrote: “This is Calvinball jurisprudence with a twist. Calvinball has only one rule: There are no fixed rules. We seem to have two: that one, and this Administration always wins.”
CNN spoke with more than 20 people who have closely followed Jackson’s work on the court as admirers, as critics and as confidants. Those most intimate to Jackson or other justices sought to speak without being identified because of the nature of their personal assessments. There is division among even liberals over whether Jackson’s methods, particularly as she publicly impugns conservatives’ integrity, are alienating and counterproductive.
Those closest to Jackson say she is not oblivious to the hard feelings she has generated. They say she is moving intentionally, speaking to an audience beyond the bench, stressing what she sees as threats to democracy.
Such tendencies have preoccupied people in the court’s orbit. Yet other justices have broken various conventions over the years, eliciting their own share of public scrutiny. A few supporters suggest Jackson draws criticism simply because she is a Black woman in public life, a point that emerged during her 2022 Senate confirmation hearings.
More importantly on the law, Jackson has set herself apart in her approach to the Constitution. She has made it a mission to counter the conservative majority’s “originalist” approach with her distinctive views on how constitutional provisions were understood at the time of their adoption. She has drawn attention to the role of Black Americans in the history of the Constitution’s Reconstruction-era amendments.
That was seen most recently in a June opinion centered on the 14th Amendment, as the majority struck down Trump’s effort to restrict birthright citizenship.
“In the decades leading up to the ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment, Black Americans organized and gathered at more than 600 local and national conventions across the country,” she wrote in a concurring opinion. “There, delegates erected the political and intellectual scaffolding for the Fourteenth Amendment and, later, for the Black Civil Rights Movement more generally.”
Jackson plainly has her eye on a future Supreme Court, one in which she would not be one of only three liberals on the nine-member bench.
“You’re thinking about people who will eventually agree with your viewpoint,” the 56-year-old justice said about her dissents in May.
Such an attitude is not unlike that of the late Justice Antonin Scalia or current Justice Clarence Thomas, who honed dissents in the niches of the law, becoming more influential as conservatism has made inroads at all levels of the judiciary.
“She knows she is not going to prevail in many cases,” said Professor Carolyn Shapiro at the Chicago-Kent College of Law. “But she also expects to be there a long time. And in those ways, she is not so different from how Justice Scalia and Justice Thomas were. They just kept at it. Much of what they were promoting is the law now.”
The right-wing views of Scalia, who served from 1986 until his 2016 death, and Thomas, who joined in 1991 and is still sitting, were once considered radical, for example, against longstanding abortion rights and entrenched gun control. Such views now dominate, because of a succession of likeminded appointees, three from Trump’s first term.
“When she uses terms like ‘Calvinball,’” added Shapiro, who, like Jackson, was once a law clerk to Justice Stephen Breyer, “she is not just speaking to her colleagues. She is speaking to the public.”
Jackson’s uncompromising attitude may be traced partly to her circumstances.
Appointed in 2022 by then-President Joe Biden to succeed the retiring Breyer, Jackson is the first liberal to join a court so lopsidedly conservative in decades. (The conservative supermajority was sealed by Trump’s 2020 appointment of Amy Coney Barrett to replace the late liberal Ruth Bader Ginsburg.)
Before then, even as liberals were in the minority, the left had four reliable votes and needed to persuade only one of the right-of-center justices to prevail. The once-crucial center, which variously tilted left, then right, over the years, has all but disappeared.
Jackson’s more senior liberal colleagues, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan, appointed in 2009 and 2010, respectively, maneuvered for most of their tenure on 5-to-4 courts. Even as they had denounced right-wing rulings, they have continued to operate more strategically among colleagues to try to find some consensus.
“This is the first left-of-center justice in decades who is taking a bold approach,” Jon Greenbaum of the progressive Washington-based Justice Legal Strategies told CNN. “Justice Jackson in a lot of these cases is not concerned about counting to five.”
Jackson’s rhetorical missives recall Scalia, a conservative icon whose attention-getting put-downs and sarcastic asides ensured his dissenting views would circulate widely — even as they alienated colleagues.
Other new appointees have flexed their individuality in a host of ways, whether in declining to put their law clerks in the “cert pool” that collectively screens incoming petitions, or in their dealings with colleagues. When he began in 2017, Justice Neil Gorsuch’s tone toward other justices made him appear to some commentators as a smug norm-breaker.
“He’s the new kid in class with his hand always up, the boy on the playground who snatches the ball out of turn,” Linda Greenhouse wrote in the New York Times of Gorsuch. “He is in his colleagues’ faces pointing out the error of their ways, his snarky tone oozing disrespect toward those who might, just might, know what they are talking about.”
Gorsuch succeeded Scalia, a justice of many idiosyncrasies, as well as distinctive legal philosophy.
Scalia was so angered by the majority’s 2015 decision to declare a right to same-sex marriage that he refused to eat lunch with his colleagues for some time. Retired Justice Anthony Kennedy, who authored the decision, revealed in his memoir last year that Scalia also barely spoke to him after the June 2015 ruling, reconciling only right before his February 2016 death.
Expanding the court’s understanding of history
Most of the conservative justices engage in an originalist approach popularized by Scalia that looks, with some variation, to what they believe was the public understanding of constitutional guarantees when they were adopted.
Jackson has tried to expand the notion of whose views should be examined.
“She had brought to the court this idea that if we’re going to look to text and history, we have to look to the whole public and the views of marginalized communities,” said David Gans of the Constitutional Accountability Center. “That has changed the dynamic, even though she’s only one vote and is often in dissent.”
Her emphasis on the historical record regarding Black Americans emerged in her first term when the court overturned race-based policies to enhance diversity in higher education, said Touro Law Professor Tiffany Graham.
“She was not just talking about race-based affirmative action being constitutional,” said Graham of Jackson’s dissenting position. “She was giving the historical account of Reconstruction and what was promised to the former slaves. She was suggesting that you can’t speak coherently about racial neutrality when one of the purposes of the 14th Amendment was to secure the rights of former slaves.”
In that case, centered on Harvard and the University of North Carolina, Jackson refuted the majority’s insistence on a “colorblind” Constitution.
“Our country has never been colorblind,” wrote Jackson, who is only the third Black justice, following Thomas and Thurgood Marshall (who served from 1967 to 1991). She referred to “the well-documented intergenerational transmission of inequality that still plagues our citizenry.”
Earlier this year, when the court struck down the Trump plan to restrict birthright citizenship under the 14th Amendment, Jackson specifically looked to the experiences of Black Americans in the era.
In a portion of her concurring opinion, she referred to the “Delegates to the Colored Conventions” and their commitment to “universal liberty and equality interests” that would sweep to all people born on US soil.
She also specifically criticized Thomas for his view that the 14th Amendment’s citizenship clause was enacted for freed slaves and therefore would not prevent Trump’s restrictions for children born here of non-citizens.
Thomas did not single out Jackson but said of the majority, “the Court adds to the sad history of the Fourteenth Amendment, which was designed and understood to secure equal rights for the freed blacks but has instead been repurposed for political projects that the Reconstruction Congress did not support.”
(Jackson declined a request from CNN for an interview. Thomas did not respond to questions related to Jackson.)
Jackson’s alternative approach to constitutional interpretation has emerged in a range of cases. When the majority restricted lower court judges’ ability to impose nationwide injunctions against potentially unconstitutional presidential actions in 2025, Jackson clashed with Justice Amy Coney Barrett, whose majority opinion looked back to the practices of the High Court of Chancery in England.
“We must therefore ask whether universal injunctions are sufficiently ‘analogous’ to the relief issued ‘by the High Court of Chancery in England at the time of the adoption of the Constitution and the enactment of the original Judiciary Act,’” Barrett wrote. “The answer is no: Neither the universal injunction nor any analogous form of relief was available in the High Court of Chancery in England at the time of the founding.”
Jackson dissented with fellow liberals, signing onto a statement by Sotomayor. But then she wrote a separate opinion:“The Founders of the United States of America squarely rejected a governing system in which the King ruled all, and all others, including the courts, were his subordinates. In our Constitution-centered system, the People are the rulers and we have the rule of law. So, it makes little sense to look to the relationship between English courts and the King for guidance on the power of our Nation’s Judiciary vis-à-vis its Executive.”
Barrett brushed off Jackson’s approach, asserting, “We will not dwell on Justice Jackson’s argument, which is at odds with more than two centuries’ worth of precedent, not to mention the Constitution itself. We observe only this: Justice Jackson decries an imperial Executive while embracing an imperial Judiciary.”
Jackson’s pattern of adding an extra dissent from the liberal bloc breaks custom. In the past, liberal dissenters tried to sign a single forceful opinion, assigned by the senior justice among them. The late Justice Ginsburg was particularly adamant about the “I write, you sign” practice when she was the senior justice on the left. Justice Kagan has made a practice of following Sotomayor’s assignment and not separately dissenting.
A year before the controversy over nationwide injunctions against Trump policies, the justices heard a more important case testing presidential power. The conservative majority in an opinion by Chief Justice Roberts gave Trump substantial immunity from criminal prosecution and bolstered “conclusive and preclusive” powers for the executive.
Sotomayor wrote the main dissent, a stinging 30 pages, signed by Kagan and Jackson.
Jackson insisted on adding more:“to explain, as succinctly as I can, the theoretical nuts and bolts of what, exactly, the majority has done today to alter the paradigm of accountability for Presidents of the United States.” She also likened the majority’s position to “a five-alarm fire,” and mocked what she called Roberts’ “feigned judicial humility.”
Roberts responded in his opinion to both dissents, particularly deriding Jackson’s for “models and paradigms of its own concoction.”
Jackson has not spared fellow liberals her criticism, faulting them at times for compromising. One instance occurred when Sotomayor and Kagan joined with Barrett, Roberts and Justice Brett Kavanaugh in a 2024 dispute from Idaho involving abortion access.
The case arose two years after the court majority had struck down nearly a half century of abortion rights, and it appeared the majority was ready to further limit abortion access, specifically in emergency rooms. In dispute was a Biden administration policy covering public hospital emergency rooms. It preempted state abortion bans when a pregnant women experiencing complications needed the procedure for stabilizing care.
There were some factual discrepancies over when physicians would be allowed to perform emergency abortions that arguably warranted returning the case to lower courts, and key justices negotiated a dismissal.
Dissenting, Jackson wrote, “It is too little, too late for the Court to take a mulligan and just tell the lower courts to carry on as if none of this has happened. … There is simply no good reason not to resolve this conflict now.”
Except that her liberal colleagues thought there was a good reason. If the full merits of the case had been heard, they might have been on the losing end of another reproductive rights controversy. Instead, the result was a partial victory for liberals.
In Jackson’s conversation with Obama and Robinson, the justice was upbeat. She regaled them with stories from her childhood, her high school debate success, her Harvard experience where she met her future husband, all tied to the memoir she began writing as soon as she joined the court. It was published in 2024, and according to her financial disclosure forms she had made more than $4 million from it so far.
Jackson, who served on US district and appellate courts before her 2022 appointment, has turned more somber in other appearances, as last year at a legal conference in Indianapolis. When asked what keeps her up at night, she said, “The state of our democracy.” She has made clear in her writing that she believes the Trump administration is a serious threat that must constantly be called out.
(For his part, Trump, who has often disparaged Black women, referred to Jackson in April as “that new, Low IQ person, that somehow found her way to the bench.”)
Regarding life at the Supreme Court, Jackson tells audiences the justices have cordial relationships and have “learned to disagree without being disagreeable.”
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Any small group dynamic has its personal differences and quirks. Earlier this year, Chief Justice Roberts told a judicial conference that he was trying to figure out how to shorten justices’ oral arguments, which were carrying on for “too long.” Roberts did not mention Jackson, but she has been the main cause of the protracted sessions since she joined the bench. (During this first month of the 2026-27 session, all justices, including Jackson, seemed slightly more mindful of time.)
Roberts has shown that he is aware of navigating among his colleagues, over differences large and small.
It can sometimes be “the little things,” he said last year at a Georgetown Law School appearance.
“I mean, if you’re sitting next to somebody, and you just can’t stand the way he or she kind of taps the chair, you’re thinking, ‘OK, we’ll be here together for 20 years.’ And you know, I’ve got to decide, am I going to tell her to stop doing that, or am I going to just get over it, or what?”