I found out today that our school is going to be visted by Ketanji Brown Jackson, one our country’s nine Supreme Court Justices. As an AP Government teacher this is thrilling. We just finished learning about the judicial branch last week and all my students know who she is. I’ve had (now retired) congressmen Earl Blumenauer visit my class before, and early in his presidency George W. Bush gave a speech in our gym (I was conveniently out of town for that). The Justice will be visiting in March as part of a book tour to promote her recent memoir Lovely One.

Ketanji Brown Jackson was appointed by President Biden in 2022 and is the newest Justice of the Supreme Court. She’s a fellow Gen Xer who grew up in Miami, Florida and was raised by two teachers. She earned her Bachelor’s and her Master’s degrees from Harvard and served as a supervising editor of the Harvard Law Review. She replaced Justice Stephen Breyer whom she had clerked for previously. She is also the first SCOTUS justice to have been a public defender. She is also the first African American woman to serve on the Supreme Court.

Since being on the court, she has stood out for being willing to ask a lot of questions during oral arguments. By contrast, longest serving Justice Clarence Thomas went 10 years without asking a single question from the bench (from February 2006 to February 2016). Justice Brown Jackson has also written 8 solo dissents thus far, an unusually high number. Finally, students of the Supreme Court have described her as pushing ‘progressive originalism.’ Conservatives tend to stake a claim to ‘originalism,’ which is a reading of the law that harkens back to the supposed ‘original’ intent of the founders. In Justice Brown Jackson’s case, she has harkened back to America’s ‘second founding’—the Reconstruction Era–and especially the 14th Amendment to argue in favor of ideas such as affirmative action.

Needless to say, I’m stoked to see her speak in person in the spring.