Ketanji Brown Jackson’s professional career took a bumpy direction in the immediate aftermath of her clerkship with Justice Breyer. She spent 18 months at a law firm in Boston before moving to “a tiny firm that specialized in the negotiated resolution of mass tort claims,” and then, 18 months later, took a staff-lawyer position with the U.S. Sentencing Commission. After less than two years in that job, she joined a federal public defender’s office, and two years later—eleven years out of law school—she began a three-year stint “of counsel,” rather than as partner, with a law firm.
Jackson herself (according to this Wall Street Journal article) has lightheartedly referred to her decade as a “professional vagabond,” and her frequent job changes on a flat or even downward trajectory would be seen by many as yellow flags. So I’m especially pleased to discover and highlight Jackson’s admirable commitment to figure out what she called “the ‘working mother’ thing”—how, that is, to find a job that she found rewarding and to “have enough flexibility that I actually get to spend some time with my wonderful husband and girls.” Here’s her full entry from the Harvard Law School Class of 1996’s 10-year report, published in the spring of 2006:
(I’ll add that I think it’s incumbent on husbands/fathers as well as wives/mothers to work to strike a sound work/family balance.)
I find it unfortunate that Jackson’s courage to do “the ‘working mother’ thing” seems to have received little or no attention. Instead, her supporters are much more intent on exaggerating her (ample but hardly overwhelming) qualifications.
Take, for example, Jackson’s two years “as an appellate specialist” in the federal public defender’s office. From most of her supporters, you’d think that these two years were somehow transformational and uniquely qualify her to be a Supreme Court justice. But as criminal-defense lawyer Scott Greenfield, who supports Jackson’s nomination, observes (emphasis added):
[Jackson’s] supporters make much of her having spent a little over two years working as a federal appellate defender. Not since Thurgood Marshall has there been anyone on SCOTUS with any criminal defense background, and there’s never been a former public defender on the Supreme Court. Breadth of experience is good, right? But as experience goes, this is fairly negligible. Indeed, it’s possible that she will be the “criminal defense expert” on the Court like Harry Blackmun was the “medical expert” because he had represented the Mayo Clinic, except he was no medical expert.
I have severe doubts whether Judge Jackson’s extremely brief foray as a federal appellate defender makes her much [of] a criminal defense expert. If she had 20 years in the trenches, that would be one thing. She barely had enough time to make a dent in her desk chair, and there is nothing to suggest she has any clue what it’s like to walk into state court arraignments after three minutes in lockup. Yes, this is experience that’s sorely needed on the Supreme Court, which makes monumental decisions about criminal law while indulging in a theoretical fantasy about how the world functions on the street and in the trenches. It’s unclear (to me, at least) that she’s got the experience to bring reality into the conference room. You know the old saying, “a little knowledge is dangerous”?