The Court Ketanji Brown Jackson Knew

This is not an article about Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson. It is, rather, a look back at the Supreme Court she once knew—knew intimately, in fact, during the 1999–2000 Court term, when she was a law clerk to Justice Stephen Breyer, the justice whom President Joe Biden recently nominated her to replace.

From a certain perspective, nothing is unique about Judge Jackson’s status as a former Supreme Court law clerk. A majority of the justices are former clerks, Breyer among them. But no two Supreme Court terms are alike. Each is shaped by the particular cases on the docket, by the tensions evoked as the justices work against the clock to resolve their disputes, by compromises reached or disagreements left to fester. Did her year at the Court shape the judge she later became? Inevitably it must have, in ways only she knows. And of course, she had an insider’s view of the events of her term that no outside observer shares. So the point of revisiting the 1999–2000 term is not to speculate or extrapolate but simply to describe the Court that she saw and experienced firsthand. Though today’s Court differs in obvious ways—the only justice besides Breyer—the backward look suggests that much about the current Court will be familiar to the former law clerk.