“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,” Justice Barrett wrote, in an opinion [in Trump v. CASA] signed by all five of the other Republican appointees.
“The principal dissent focuses on conventional legal terrain,” Justice Barrett went on, referring to Justice Sotomayor’s opinion. “Justice Jackson, however, chooses a startling line of attack that is tethered neither to these sources nor, frankly, to any doctrine whatsoever.”...
I think Liptak is trying to build Jackson's reputation. He writes things like: "Justice Jackson has appeared comfortable expressing herself from the start." He compares her to Justice Breyer and Justice Brandeis:
“I was frightened to death for the first three years,” Justice Breyer said in a 2006 interview. Even Justice Louis D. Brandeis, a giant of the law who sat on the court from 1916 to 1939, needed time to find his footing. “So extraordinary an intellect as Brandeis said it took him four or five years to feel that he understood the jurisprudential problems of the court,” Justice Felix Frankfurter wrote of his friend and mentor.
That does not work as a compliment to Jackson.
ADDED: The Washington Post just published a similar article, "One of the Supreme Court’s sharpest critics sits on it/Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson emerges as a strong voice on an unusually fractious U.S. Supreme Court."
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68 comments:
Jackson's a women. Whatever she feels counts as correct. That's where the comfortable comes from.
Has a Supreme Court justice ever resigned in shame? Has one ever retired early, fueling speculation of inadequacy? Just curious. Being unafraid to speak up is not always an asset, it's only an asset if your words have value and cogency.
To make that fully explicit, pointing out that someone was comfortable expressing herself from the start is not a point of comparison, but rather a point of contrast, to two former justices who, according to their accounts, spent their first 3-5 years watching/learning/listening. But Liptak misunderstood his own prose, and failed to notice that this was a point of contrast.
I have questions about her ability to do her job.
Aggie:
Abe Fortas.
She is a low-IQ DEI hire. A failed justice there as window dressing. Deliberately put there to fail.
It's good to show the Supreme Court for what it is: a Star Chamber and mini-Legislature.
It's not a real court.
I read somewhere that Roberts has had to ask her to stop talking so the lawyers can answer questions. Apparently, she talks a lot. Not lacking in self confidence, I guess.
"Deliberately put there to fail."
By Biden? What sense does that make?
Jackson exemplifies The Imperial Judiciary. Kagan believes in it too but disguises it here and there. Sotomayor is dumber than Jackson.
Jackson's language may be extreme, but as a practical matter the other two liberal/left justices join her 95 percent of the time. They vote as a bloc.
Justice Charles Whittaker resigned in the early 1960s, after a rather desultory performance and a nervous breakdown.
Jackson -- ANY black woman --was the South Carolina Democrat machine's quid pro quo to Biden for delivering him a desperately-needed primary victory, without which his campaign was OVER.
America will suffer a long time for that perfidy ... a purely token SCOTUS appointment, along with four years of what was probably the most corrupt, incompetent, and vindictive presidential administration in American history.
"Justice Jackson has appeared comfortable expressing herself from the start."
This may well be the first time in her legal career that anyone has suggested she may have gotten something wrong. I guess into every Strong Black Woman(TM)'s life, a little mean-spirited racism must fall.
If Hillary had won instead of Trump, she'd be writing majority opinions.
This again:
Justice Jackson and the AI Law Professor – a critique worth reading the whole thing - if you have not.
Disqualifying Problems
1. Inappropriate Judicial Voice
Your use of colloquialisms like "wait for it" is completely unacceptable in judicial writing. Supreme Court opinions are formal legal documents, not casual commentary. This language suggests you don't understand the gravity and formality required of your institutional role.
2. Anti-Legal Attitude
Describing the majority's statutory analysis as "mind-numbingly technical" and "legalese" is disqualifying for a judge. Legal analysis is technical - that's the point. Your dismissive attitude toward careful legal reasoning suggests you're fundamentally unsuited for judicial office. Judges who find legal analysis boring should find different careers.
3. Complete Misunderstanding of Basic Legal Concepts
Your confusion about what constitutes "relief" in injunctive contexts shows alarming gaps in basic civil procedure knowledge. When you claim universal injunctions don't grant relief to nonparties, you demonstrate you don't understand how injunctions function.
4. Straw Man Argumentation
Your repeated framing of this as about whether courts can "order the Executive to follow the law" is intellectually dishonest. You're either incapable of understanding the actual legal question or deliberately mischaracterizing it.
When the left does this DEI shit, it only hurts the public perception of the identity group it's pretending to support, but that that kind of unintended consequence is their signature move. Of all the intelligent Black women in the country this is who they chose to represent a group badly in need of better representatives in public life. Blacks, and especially female Blacks, are being embarrassed daily by the ones the left pushes forward. I guess they do that with the Whites too, now that I think about it.
"To make that fully explicit, pointing out that someone was comfortable expressing herself from the start is not a point of comparison, but rather a point of contrast, to two former justices who, according to their accounts, spent their first 3-5 years watching/learning/listening. But Liptak misunderstood his own prose, and failed to notice that this was a point of contrast."
I think he fully understands the problem with his argument, but it was the best argument for the point he wanted to make. The raw material is what it is. The question is only whether he seriously believed anyone would buy the interpretation he was inviting readers to make.
This whole thing puts me in mind of the coffee cup I saw recently: "A Black woman is speaking!"
Under what possible set of guidelines are we to conclude, in any sphere of life, that being a [racial/sexual category] [non-man] somehow magically endows someone with wisdom or intelligence? Can we trace it back to the stupid and much-mocked "wise Latina" thing? And then there's the implied rest of the coffee cup - "shut up!" I mean, it's no wonder intersectionality is so unpopular with normal people.
What I'm gathering about Jackson is that the best defense her defenders can offer is that she is happy to give her opinion... no matter what. That hardly seems laudatory.
Even by the limbo-low bar of "Better than Kamala" Justice Brown fails to shine.
I see the SCOTUS will be looking at trans in women's sports. Has she hired a biologist as clerk?
(Looks like a lawyer would help her too.)
Thanks, Leslie Graves, I thought I was missing something.
"I think he fully understands the problem with his argument, but it was the best argument for the point he wanted to make. The raw material is what it is."
Shouldn't Liptak be embarrassed to do that? I would be.
"I see the SCOTUS will be looking at trans in women's sports. Has she hired a biologist as clerk?"
Seems to me she should recuse herself.
She's brash. She's sassy. She's a strong black woman. Hear her roar. You simply can't handle it, you wimpy whites.
The problem is if the left successfully nominated a Black woman for SCOTUS who was capable of doing the job well, she would be siding with the conservatives on the bench.
You know who wrote the Constituion? Racists. She doesn't care what a bunch of dead white males thought. She's Action Jackson, and she's fierce, she's feminine and she's in your face!
"Has a Supreme Court justice ever resigned in shame?"
Sixty-five years of affirmative action was bound to produce someone like Ketanji Brown Jackson -- accredited yet hollow, a black-robed simpleton.
What do you suppose was affirmed by all that action?
She is a DEI appointment, not a merit appointment. End of story. Democrats do not like meritorious blacks. They might not echo Party groupthinker.
The headline is a joke — “Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson Makes Herself Heard,…”
In 2022, SCOTUSblog reported, “In the first three months of the 2022-23 term, the Supreme Court’s newest member, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, was by far the most active participant in oral arguments, according to an analysis of the written transcripts for the 27 cases the court has heard so far.
“Jackson has spoken, on average, nearly 1,350 words per argument. The court’s next most-talkative members — Justices Elena Kagan, Sonia Sotomayor, and Neil Gorsuch, in that order — each have spoken, on average, between 800 and 900 words per argument.”
When practiced, the joke was: If you had the law, you argued the law. If you had the facts, you argued the facts. If you had neither the law nor the facts, you just argued.
Sadly, Jackson is committed to the third option.
I'm imagining Jasmine Crocket on the Supreme Court. Is that what she's like?
“Jackson has spoken, on average, nearly 1,350 words per argument. The court’s next most-talkative members — Justices Elena Kagan, Sonia Sotomayor,…"
LOL.
She is not qualified at all. She is a mirror image of Biden, Kamala and Tim Walz. All mob-controlled puppets for their greater good.
#NotAllLegalGiants
why is my post vanishing?
testing
https://zarkfiles.substack.com/p/justice-jackson-and-the-ai-law-professor
The phrase "Presidents are not kings" gained notable prominence in recent years through its use by federal judges in rulings concerning the limits of presidential power. Recent Uses:
Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson: In a 2019 ruling while she was a federal district judge, she wrote, "Stated simply, the primary takeaway from the past 250 years of recorded American history is that Presidents are not kings," in her opinion that former [Trump] White House counsel Don McGahn had to comply with a congressional subpoena. Jackson explained that this view reflects a federal government designed to prevent tyranny by dividing the powers of a monarch among three co-equal branches.
Judge Tanya Chutkan: In 2021, she used the phrase when rejecting former President Trump's attempt to block the release of White House records related to the January 6th Capitol riot to a congressional committee. Judge Chutkan wrote, "Presidents are not kings, and Plaintiff is not President,". She also wrote that Trump failed to acknowledge the deference owed to the incumbent president's judgment and that his position seemed based on the idea that executive power exists perpetually.
Maybe KBJ relies on a literal interpretation of the word ‘Supreme’. KBJ believes, as Supremes, they are omnipotent interpreters of the Constitution. Or something. More or less.
If you read her dissent in CASA, it's very clear that she sees the judiciary -- not just SCOTUS but every individual federal court as well -- as having supremacy over the Executive and Congress. She simply doesn't understand the concept of coequal branches or judicial restraint. And the other justices' refusal to regard the judiciary as having general supervisory authority over the other branches is so baffling to her, she can discern no reason for it other than their desire to reach results in cases that align with their personal policy preferences.
I don't think KBJ is "low-IQ" (which I would roughly peg at 90 or below); but she's clearly unfit to be on the court in terms of her intellect and depth of understanding in Constitutional Law. I would not be surprised if she quits in a few years in favor of becoming a university president or something like that.
Jackson didn't know what a woman was during confirmation. Someone should have asked her if she knew what the Constitution was.
Others have made the point that Barrett is the most likely swing vote for the liberal bloc to win over, so it's especially significant if Jackson is alienating her.
That does not work as a compliment to Jackson.
-----------
Right.
Now, with that in mind, go back and reread and rethink your conclusion that Liptak is trying to spin the article to "help" Justice Jackson. He's clearly not.
You can't have that cake and eat it too, missy. You can't jam jigsaw puzzle pieces together. Something doesn't fit. You can't opine it when you "catch" something that's obviously true and doesn't meet your pre-ordained conclusion going in...
Of course we get it. You're just using this post to bait your readers into bashing the black woman justice AND the NYT. Your marketing tricks disadvantage your intellectual rhetoric, but truth be told... it's all about putting money into the coffers for meade and the boys now, your reputation as a legal scholar or close reader doesn't really matter anymore now that you've got the pension, not the salary, coming in... heh. Go out and play in Madison now, ann. Maybe you two will make some new friends amongst the people you're settled amongst. For MAGA supporters, you sure shun living with us.
3john2 said...
Jackson didn't know what a woman was during confirmation. Someone should have asked her if she knew what the Constitution was.
-------------
She the one married to the wealthy white guy, right? She might not know law, heh, but she sure know her stuff to get in on the Court. Here ann married a jewish guy, and all she got was a UW tenure career... Should have gone with a WASP. /s
Hit the tip jar. Althouse is one of the few places left that encourages this here...
Jackson's an example of a woman who is not afraid to say "NO" and understands the price to be paid.
It's all still an exercise in theory for ann. She has always looked, at the last minute, for the seat on the winning bandwagon and put her pretty hand on, and understood the fellas would pull her up and in...
Jackson hasn't had that same experience all her life and it shows. In the woods two paths split, and Jackson chose the better. ann's got meade though, no small consolation prize, and the cohen family abode, and all the tips ann can garner to take care of her BigBoy and his expensive toys... Good on ya, ann. Your daddy would be proud of that bank account, if not his gay grandson(s). nttawwt.
It's not true that the Constitution divided the powers of the King among three branches of government nor did the Founding Fathers spring out of a land empty of history or precedents. People had been living in the 13 colonies for 160 years when the Constitution was written and adopted and during that entire period they had ceaselessly struggled against various forms of absolutism - claims by the King, claims by Anglican bishops, claims by Royal governors, claims by the British Parliament, claims by appointed assemblies, claims by appointed judges. The struggle at first mirrored a similar struggle in England which resulted the execution of the King's chief advisor, then the Archbishop of Canterbury, then the King himself, and then finally resulted in England being declared a republic without a King or aristocracy in 1649. But this result was undone in 1660. The same struggle in the colonies began to diverge slowly from the English outcome.
The point is that 160 years of history in which all forms of government were tried out over and over (and the results compared with Greek and Roman history) lay behind the form the Constitution took and the way it used existing forms of a legislature, a court system and an executive.
This long experience is one major reason for thinking that the Constitution is based on enduring principles. Jackson is supposed to be able to interpret those principles in the light of that history. But she despises the past too much to learn from it. She does not even know what a woman is - how could she know what the US Constitution is? She was put in place by those who represent a new form of absolutism. They feel free, in fact, compelled, to shove a new interpretation of the whole American enterprise down our throats like nurses force-feeding in an old time mental hospital. They think they will be colluding with injustice if they don't disregard the past because out of the past come injustices. But principles come from that same past and experience has shown that the absolutists, in losing the past, progressively lose all principles and then fall to creating new injustices while disregarding all the old ones. They create more injustice than constitutionalists (LIa Thomas, October 7, settler colonialism, pallets of cash) as well as invariably using their position to destroy free speech (whose mockery is deadly to their pretensions) and then working to enrich themselves without limit. How much is KJT now worth? A lot more than her Constitutional interpretations, I suspect.
She is unburdened by what has been.
Loud, perhaps, but that isn't the same as strong.
Roman Hruska finally gets his way. (Begley will know what I’m talking about)
It's interesting that in the Supreme Court response to Judge Brian E. Murphy's attempt to ignore the Supreme court ruling that Kagan switched to side with the majority but Jackson but Sotomayor effectively think that it's ok for a lower court to try to ignore a Supreme Court ruling.
They are both incapable of seeing that they are calling for an "Imperial Judiciary" at the district court level.
"Sit on it!" - Fonzie
actually no, hruska argued for a more diverse body, of applicants, not this crew of credentialed idiots,
did berger and blackmun, really show more commonsense that haynesworth and carswell I would say not,
The federal courthouse in Omaha is named after Roman Hruska. It is an absolute palace.
A lonely dissenter with her own point of view. It sounds like the early Clarence Thomas.
no, Justice Thomas made sense then, even more now,
The raw material is what it is
Ouch. That’s a strong backhand…
I figure they do this because they went all-in. Yes they failed but what to do? It’s not like they can say yes we’re guilty of abandoning journalism and rational thought in favor if trying to prop up an unimaginably unpopular political movement…bit what then for them. Better to just keep plugging along, hoping for the best…
Solo dissents can ultimately command a majority if they develop an argument that the majority's result is incompatible with foundational principles. No guarantee that a majority of the Court will agree down the road, but it has happened frequently enough -- e.g., Scalia's lone dissent in Morrison v. Olson, to pick the most famous (recent) one. Justice Harlan's lone dissent in Plessy is perhaps the most famous of all.
On the current court, Justice Thomas has been the most frequent lone dissenter, and over time his dissents too have had a way of shaping later majority rulings. Jackson's dissents don't have that quality because in making them she disdains any serious engagement with foundational legal principles. In her dissent earlier this term in Dept of Ed v. California, for example, Justice Jackson dismissed the Gov't's arguments that the case was barred by lack of subject matter jurisdiction, sovereign immunity, and improper venue as "tangential legal questions" that were just "shiny objects" distracting the Court from her preferred outcome. The majority was muted in rejecting that (really weird) notion out of hand. Jackson's dissent in Trump v. CASA was no better, but this time got a more sharply worded blast from the Court.
Whatever she thinks she's accomplishing by doing this, it isn't working with her colleagues. All she's getting for these unserious opinions is some very silly cheerleading from NYT and WaPo.
Original Mike asked: "By Biden? What sense does that make?"
Biden is a racist. He hates black people. He put the dumbest one he could find on the Supreme Court to get routinely slapped around by the whites and Hispanics. He knows she's an idiot and will make all black people look like idiots for decades. She's already being mocked not only by the entire nation, but by her fellow Supreme Court justices, who are literally calling her stupidity out in their writings.
Joe Biden said Barack Obama was dream team because "he's one of the clean ones." Joe Biden's best friend in the Senate was literally a Grand Dragon in the Ku Klux Klan.
How can you not figure this out?
Ridiculous.
"That does not work as a compliment to Jackson." Correct. But the tell here is that the average prog doesn't realize it.
Progs and the country are stuck with an obviously second-rate DEI appointment, embarassing to them, to the court, and to the lefty cause. Trying to "build her up" reflects the embarrassment. Insofar as progs can be embarrassed about anything at all, of course.
Before SCOTUS issued the CASA decision, I had been thinking that one possible approach to defeating nationwide injunctions, or at least turning them into a complete mockery, was for the Trump Administration to do its own forum shopping and get a district judge to issue an injunction against another distict judge.
just to Be Clear..
This is a "judge", that when asked what a woman was, replied:
[and i QUOTE]
"i have NO F*cking IDEA!
I wouldn't know what a woman was, if she sat on my face!"
They LITERALLY picked her, because she was clueless
No king, sure, of course, but no unelected rulers sitting in council, either. Sorry Justice Jackson, we go by rules here. Written rules, we all can read. And decisions based on those rules, no matter how tortured. See the Dobbs case as an example of why that is important.
Defending the DEI hire after she gets started and you can compare her to the merit based hires.
"Will no one rid me of [these] turbulent" words/laws/precedent?
Picky, picky, picky.
On one side we have, "two former justices who, according to their accounts, spent their first 3-5 years watching/learning/listening."
On the other we have someone who does not watch/learn/listen.
Knowing what you don't know vs believing you already know it all....
Justice Jackson is unfit, and we'll have her there for 40 years.
She emerges more as a loud voice than a strong voice. Of course, a petulant child has a loud voice, if not a particularly pleasant or enlightening one. While I disagreed with almost all of RBG's opinions, at least she was somewhat consistent and found niches where she did not appear to be an idiot in her dissents and opinions. Jackson-Brown is going to go down as possibly the least qualified juror ever to sit on the USSC......and that takes some real effort, we have had some doozies.
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