Ketanji Brown Jackson

Ketanji Brown Jackson became the first Black woman to serve on the Supreme Court when she took her seat on June 30, 2022. She was born on September 14, 1970, in Washington, D.C., and was given a first name suggested by an aunt then serving in the Peace Corps in West Africa. She grew up in Miami, Florida, where both of her parents worked in the public schools; her father later became the chief attorney for the county school board. She was a champion debater at Miami Palmetto Senior High School and graduated from Harvard College in 1992 and Harvard Law School in 1996. She clerked for three federal judges, including Justice Stephen Breyer, whom she would later succeed on the Court.

Jackson worked in private practice and served as an assistant federal public defender in Washington from 2005 to 2007, making her the first former federal public defender to sit on the Supreme Court. From 2010 to 2014 she was vice chair of the U.S. Sentencing Commission, which revised federal sentencing guidelines for crack cocaine and other drug offenses. President Barack Obama appointed her to the federal district court in Washington in 2013, and President Joe Biden elevated her to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit in 2021. When Breyer announced his retirement in January 2022, Biden nominated Jackson, and the Senate confirmed her 53 to 47 on April 7, 2022.

Jackson is part of the Court's liberal wing and is known for asking many questions at oral argument and for writing frequent separate opinions. Her first majority opinion, in Delaware v. Pennsylvania (2023), settled a dispute among states over unclaimed money from certain financial instruments. She dissented in the Students for Fair Admissions case against the University of North Carolina (2023), which ended race-conscious college admissions, and in Trump v. CASA (2025), which limited universal injunctions issued by federal courts. She did not take part in the companion Harvard case because she had served on one of the university's governing boards. Her memoir, Lovely One, was published in 2024.