At her swearing-in ceremony to the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia in 2013, Ketanji Brown Jackson quipped to the group assembled, “It takes a village to raise a judge.” Jackson’s new memoir, “Lovely One” – the English translation of her first and middle names, Ketanji Onyika – pays homage to many of the family members and mentors who made up her village. It is also a tale of humility, faith, and optimism, but like other memoirs by sitting justices, it ends shortly after she is confirmed to the Supreme Court, doing little to reveal the inner workings of the often opaque court and leaving the reader to wonder how Jackson has fared in the two often-tumultuous terms since.
“Lovely One” begins with the story of Jackson’s family, which rose in two generations from segregation to the Supreme Court. Jackson’s grandparents on both sides only attended elementary school, and her own parents attended segregated schools. Starting out, Jackson’s maternal grandfather was a chauffeur, but he tired of working for wealthy white families in Jim Crow Georgia. Jackson recounts how he would often have to sleep in the car while traveling with the white families he worked for and rely on his employers to bring him food. He left and started his own landscaping business. From there he sent all five of their children to college. Jackson’s parents became public school teachers in Washington, D.C.; her father later went back to school to earn a law degree, while her mother became a school principal.
Jackson’s own experiences of discrimination are there, too. She tells of being followed closely in stores by salespeople, even when the white friends who accompanied her were not. “Over time,” she wrote, “I learned to zip shut any bags I might be carrying before I walked into a shop, and to always keep my hands in plain sight. I also never entered a clothing store’s changing room without first tracking down a salesperson and establishing the exact number of pieces I would be trying on, even when doing so was not expected or required.”
She also recounts how, as a small child, the mother of a white playmate forbade her son from playing with Jackson when she found out they were friends. His mother, the boy told her the next day, had said she was “just too different.” Many years later, as a young attorney who had held a prestigious clerkship on the Supreme Court, older partners at the law firm where she worked would assume that she was a legal secretary and “inquire pleasantly how long I had been with the firm and which of his colleagues I assisted.”
“Lovely One” is also a love story: Ketanji Brown met Patrick Jackson in a history class at Harvard College during the first semester of her sophomore year. Over the following months, what started off as a friendship eventually became romantic. Before that, Patrick endured a grilling from Ketanji’s female friends, who later told her that they “wanted to make sure that Patrick understood you were a prize, because a White guy dating a Black woman in Boston wasn’t going to be easy.”
Patrick passed muster then and again a few years later, when he asked Johnny and Ellery Brown, Jackson’s parents, for their permission to propose to Jackson. He proves to be one of his wife’s strongest cheerleaders (and has been seen traveling with her at a number of book tour events), but the Browns also play a major role in Jackson’s memoir, providing an “unwavering love for and belief in their children” but also instilling what Jackson describes as their “greatest gift”: the grit and grace on which she would rely again and again.
Jackson credits others who paved the way for her to reach the country’s highest court – Justice Thurgood Marshall, the first Black man to sit on the Supreme Court, and Judge Constance Baker Motley, the first Black woman to become a federal judge, and with whom Jackson shares a birthday. She also pays tribute to some of her mentors, such as Judge Patti Saris, the federal trial judge for whom she clerked during her first year out of law school, and Fran Berger, the coach of the high school debate team where a teenage Jackson found community and confidence in a predominantly white school.
And still others appear in the book in smaller, but still pivotal, roles. Jackson recounts the events that led to her stint as a clerk for Justice Stephen Breyer, whom she would eventually succeed on the Supreme Court. Although many students at elite law schools devote considerable time and energy to try to position themselves for Supreme Court clerkships, Jackson’s path was apparently simpler. In the spring of 1999, she received a phone call from an unnamed former law school professor, suggesting that she apply for a position with Breyer that would begin in the summer. She interviewed with the justice within a few days and was offered the job within a few hours of her interview.
Similarly, it was Judge Paul Friedman, who knew Jackson through a legal group, who suggested that she should apply for an upcoming vacancy on the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia. Jackson was confirmed to that position in 2013, during the Obama administration, paving the way for her promotion to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit during the early months of the Biden administration and, less than a year later, to the Supreme Court.
“Lovely One” is sometimes very candid, with Jackson her own toughest critic. She discusses the difficulty of balancing motherhood and her jobs as a lawyer, describing going back to work after the birth of her first child as “one of the most difficult periods of my career.” Jackson, who had always regarded herself as a “hard worker who made excellent contributions,” was also the default parent who needed to leave the office at a reasonable hour to take over for her daughter’s caregiver, a demand at odds with deadlines and stringent billable-hour requirements.
After two years, Jackson embarked on what she describes as her “odyssey as a professional vagabond,” leaving her large corporate law firm for a boutique arbitration and mediation practice that was heavy on actuarial analysis but also offered more work-life balance. From there, she moved on to positions as a lawyer for the U.S. Sentencing Commission, an assistant federal public defender, a lawyer in the appellate and Supreme Court group at another large corporate law firm, and – finally – a role as a commissioner on the Sentencing Commission.
But on the home front, she grappled with her older daughter’s early academic and social struggles in school. Talia Jackson was diagnosed as a child with a form of epilepsy and eventually as being on the autism spectrum. Jackson recounts how she is “flooded with guilt and grief at how hard I pushed” Talia at times before her diagnosis, wanting her to reach her full academic potential.
As a Supreme Court nominee and now as a sitting justice, Jackson has not been known for wearing her faith on her sleeve, but spirituality – more so than organized religion – surfaces repeatedly in “Lovely One.” Jackson describes attending a predominantly Black church in Cambridge in the wake of her grandmother’s death, writing that those Sundays at church “would be spiritually grounding for me,” and she suggests that, given that Patrick Jackson’s ancestors and hers “existed at completely opposite poles of the American experience,” their relationship was “nothing short of a miracle — or, as [her grandmother] might have expressed it, the purest evidence of God.”
Similarly, discussing her family’s views on the likelihood of a Supreme Court appointment once she had been confirmed to the D.C. Circuit, she writes that “we all trusted that if God ordained that I should one day serve our country in that way, it would happen. My only charge in the meantime was to do my best — as a judge, as a wife and mother, and as a concerned citizen in our besieged world.”
Although “Lovely One” ends shortly after Jackson is confirmed to the Supreme Court in 2022, Jackson weighs in, albeit obliquely, on some of the issues that the court has faced during her brief tenure as a justice. In 2023, the court – with Jackson and two of her liberal colleagues in dissent – struck down the consideration of race by Harvard and the University of North Carolina in their undergraduate admissions program. In discussing her time at Harvard College, Jackson notes that she had attended middle and high schools that were predominantly white. Harvard was also predominantly white, she writes, “but it offered a sizable community of Black students, among whom I would experience such a profound cultural comfort that it allowed me to release the breath I hadn’t realized I was holding.”
Jackson also describes the staging of a musical based on the life of social justice reformer Frederick Douglass, which she saw first with her daughter but then again with her law clerks not long after arriving at the court. “The primary reason I had wanted my law clerks to see the show,” she explains, “was to offer them some context for the debate then playing out among legal scholars and jurists about the extent to which history should be relied upon in interpreting the law.”
“Lovely One” is a lovely memoir, although it occasionally leaves its reader wanting more. Towards the beginning of the book, Jackson tells the story of how she began to think about being a lawyer at four years old, sitting at the kitchen table while her father studied. She aspired to be a judge even before she was a teenager, when she read about Motley, and when Sandra Day O’Connor was appointed as the first female Supreme Court justice in 1981. But Jackson allocates only a few pages to her time at Harvard Law School, noting that her first year there lived “up to its reputation of being a relentless and demoralizing grind.” There is very little about the classes that she took, the legal theories to which she was exposed, or the professors from whom she learned. Instead, she devotes most of her discussion to the two years she spent on the Harvard Law Review – a prestigious and demanding position that she says “forced her to grow.”
“Lovely One” is above all a story of optimism. Jackson writes that just as she was inspired by Judge Constance Motley as a child, she hopes that her story will “open a door to those who might one day seek to become judges themselves, extending the chain of possibility and purpose in this life of the law, and lifting us all on the rising tide of their dreams.”
But she leaves the reader to guess as to how Jackson applies her apparently unflagging optimism to her present role. Jackson only hints at the court’s current make-up, noting in her discussion of former President Barack Obama’s stalled nomination of Merrick Garland (a nomination for which she was also considered) that the subsequent appointment of three conservative justices by former President Donald Trump “decisively shifted the ideological balance of the Court.”
Jackson acknowledges that when she was being considered for a Supreme Court vacancy again in 2022, she was hesitant about joining the court out of concern for the intense scrutiny that it would bring to her family. If she had any qualms about joining a court where she was likely to be in dissent (as she was in her first two terms) in many high-profile cases for the foreseeable future, she keeps them to herself.
Instead, she closes on a relentlessly upbeat note, writing that “God has provided me with everything I might ever need to meet this moment.” “I have faith, my extraordinary family and cherished friends. I have the privilege of serving others by defending the Constitution and the rule of law. And I have art. How much more lovely,” she concludes, “can any one life be?”
This post is also published on SCOTUSblog.
