Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson pens this year’s Multnomah County Everybody Reads autobiography

U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson is the first Black woman ever confirmed to the highest court in the land, and she’s been a consistent and clear voice of dissent on it. She’s also the author of a memoir, “Lovely One,” which was picked as this year’s choice for the Multnomah County Library Everybody Reads program. We talk to Jackson in front of an audience of Portland high school students.

Note: The following transcript was transcribed digitally and validated for accuracy, readability and formatting by an OPB volunteer.

Dave Miller: This is Think Out Loud on OPB. I’m Dave Miller coming to you today in front of an audience of Portland high school students. We are spending the hour today with U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson.

When she was young, Ketanji Brown Jackson was excited about the law and was a theatre kid. In a college application essay, she wrote she wanted to be the first Black female Supreme Court Justice to appear on a Broadway stage. If she has not made it to Broadway yet, she has achieved the much more rare distinction. In 2022, she was confirmed as the first Black woman to ever serve on the highest court in the land.

It’s not her only first. She’s also the first Floridian on the court and the only justice in history who was previously a federal public defender. She’s worked in private practice. She clerked for a Supreme Court justice and she spent nearly 8 years as a federal district judge before becoming an appeals court judge. Through all of it, she’s also raised two daughters. She told her story in the memoir “Lovely One”, which was chosen as this year’s Everybody Reads selection from Multnomah County Library. It is my great honor to welcome Ketanji Brown Jackson to Think Out Loud. Welcome to the show.

Ketanji Brown Jackson: Thank you so much. I’m delighted to be here.

Miller: Do you mind telling us a story that you tell in your book, it’s of being at your grandparents’ house when you’re about 8 years old and seeing a handwritten note in the kitchen.

Brown Jackson: Yes, well, it was the kind of thing that really sticks with you through your whole life. My grandparents had grown up in rural Georgia, did not get a lot of education, never finished school, and I was not aware of this. My parents and grandparents at this point were living in Miami, which is where I was raised, and we used to have big family gatherings at my grandmother’s house. And one Sunday we went to her house, it’s time to eat and I went into the kitchen and there was a handwritten note on a napkin in the sink. And when I looked at it, all the words were misspelled. It was telling us that something was wrong with the sink and we shouldn’t use it.

But I thought it was really funny, as an 8-year old who had just done well on my spelling tests and really thinking that I was progressing in terms of my education, so I brought my mom in to say look at this really funny note that I found in the sink, and my mother was livid. I mean just so upset that I would make fun of someone who didn’t have the same level of education as I did. She said, “I thought we were raising you better than that. Who do you think you are, just because you have parents who are teachers and who are able to give you a good education?” And I realized in that exchange that it was my grandmother who I was making fun of and it taught me to really be kind and to understand and be grateful for the opportunities that I’ve received that not everybody else has.

Miller: I can’t help but try to imagine what your mom was feeling in that moment as the sort of hinge between these two generations.

Brown Jackson: Yes.

Miller: You who had even more opportunities, significantly more than she had, let alone so many more than her parents’ generation.

Brown Jackson: Yes.

Miller: What do you imagine that moment meant to her?

Brown Jackson: Well, I think she felt sad, sadness at all that my grandmother was not able to experience, because of the times in which she lived. Both my grandparents and my parents grew up in segregation in the South, and really in a situation in which education – at least for my grandparents – was not something that was given to African Americans. And I think my mother had hoped that they were raising me to be a kind and understanding, if not educated, individual, and I think she was disappointed that the lessons that she had tried to teach me did not surface in that moment.

Miller: Let’s take a question from our audience. What’s your name?

Miles: My name is Miles.

Miller: Go ahead.

Miles: You’ve mentioned how your guidance counselor told you it was generally a bad idea to apply to Harvard. What do you say to high schoolers now, especially seniors who resonate with a similar experience?

Brown Jackson: Well, I would say don’t listen. I didn’t listen and there are times when you have to do what you think is right and when you are, especially in your junior year, your senior year, and you’re trying to chart a course for yourself, if there are places that you think you would like to attend, I highly recommend not listening to your guidance counselor and doing what you feel you need to do to prepare yourself. In my particular instance, I think my guidance counselor was trying to have me not get my hopes up. I don’t know that they were being mean or, I think they were just concerned that if I was thinking about places like Harvard and I didn’t get in, that I would be disappointed. So I would just say go for it.

Miller: Can you tell us about one of the people that you write had one of the most significant impacts on your life as a young person, Mrs. Berger?

Brown Jackson: Mrs. Berger. Mrs. Berger was my high school speech and debate coach. I went to a big public high school in Miami, Florida, and one of our primary extracurricular activities was speech and debate, and our team was pretty large and very successful. We used to travel around the state. We used to go, after raising money, selling bagels and candy and all the things you do to try to get enough funds to travel, we would travel nationally. And Mrs. Berger was a larger than life figure in all of our lives. She had been an orator herself. I was on the speech side of speech and debate and I think she just saw something in me. She saw the potential.

Maybe it was her thinking about her own experience in oratory, and she thought she could train me to be a national orator, and she just took me under her wing and taught me how to reason, how to write, how to lean in, despite the obstacles, to believe in myself. She had the most self-confidence, I think, of anybody I’ve ever met, and some of that rubbed off on her students.

Miller: Do you think that can be taught?

Brown Jackson: I think it can be. I think it can be. I think it is about surrounding yourself with people who believe in you. Mrs. Berger trained us, taught us all that we could do whatever we wanted to do. We could be successful in speech and debate if we put enough effort into it. And she actually was at school at all hours, talking to kids on the phone at midnight, helping us to get ourselves together for our tournaments, and every weekend she would travel with us to the various tournaments that we went to. So the dedication and the amount of effort and energy that she put into it, I think really rubbed off on us in her squad and it was life changing to be with her.

Miller: I mentioned in my intro that you wrote you wanted to be on Broadway. You were a theatre kid in various ways, and a performative kid in various ways…

Brown Jackson: Yes.

Miller:…poetry recitation, dramatic recitation, improv.

Brown Jackson: Yes.

Miller: Is there a performative aspect to being a judge?

Brown Jackson: Oh, I think so. I think the law has a performative aspect to it because it involves public speaking, it involves communication. All of these things, I think, really allow for people who are interested in theatre to have a career in the law.

Miller: You wrote in reference to your time on that debate team in high school: “Given my generally calm and good humored demeanor, very few of my speech and debate peers ever grasped that I loved winning as fiercely as Mrs. Berger did.”

Brown Jackson: I did. I did.

Miller: What does a win look like now for you when you’re often on the three side of 6-3 decisions?

Brown Jackson: Interesting. I think a win for me personally has to be communicating my thoughts and my ideas and my perspective on legal issues effectively. It’s all I can do. You come in as a justice or as a judge in the appellate level. You are working with your colleagues and at some point you vote. And you’re not going to be in the majority in every case, but you do have the opportunity to write an opinion, whether you’re on the majority side or on the dissent side. And so for me I channel my energy into trying to write the most effective and in my view most persuasive opinion I can.

Miller: I wanna hear more about your world of writing in a little bit, but let’s take another question from our audience. Go ahead.

Alexa: My name’s Alexa, and my question is, how did you get rid of your imposter syndrome in college?

Brown Jackson: Oh goodness. Well I don’t know that I ever had what people nowadays call “imposter syndrome.” There were times in which I felt uncomfortable when I was out of my element. When I first went to college, for example, as I said, I’d gone to a big public high school in the South. I went to a pretty different college in the North. It was cold, it was very unfamiliar to be in New England and I think I had some really rough sledding at the beginning, just feeling like maybe I’d made the wrong choice.

But part of what I learned from Mrs. Berger and being a competitive speaker is that you can develop resilience, your ability to really focus on your own talents and skills and ability and turning inward, I think, was very helpful to me. I also in the book talk about a chance encounter I had with a person in Harvard Yard, just walking through who must have seen that I was pretty depressed on whatever date it was, and as we passed on the path, she leaned over and said, “Persevere.” And it was like, what? It was like a moment, like a lifeline that had been thrown to me, and I kept focusing on that and really believing that I could make it through the difficult moments.

Miller: Have you ever said that to any other stranger since then? Have you passed someone and whispered “Persevere,” just passing it on 30 years later?

Brown Jackson: I have not, but I put it in the book and sometimes when I do my signature in the book, when people ask me to sign, I’ll write it. And people ask me what would I say to young people, and I often say that that’s what I would tell them, because it’s difficult. Being a successful person in any field is not easy, and you have to put effort into it, and you have to believe at some level that you can do it and to be reminded that perseverance is necessary and possible, I think is important.

Miller: Let’s take another question. What’s your name and what’s your question?

Mariah: Hello, my name is Mariah, and how would you say your experience as a public defender influences your perspective on the law?

Brown Jackson: That’s a great question. I think what being a public defender most helped me to see and understand is the significance of communication in law. What I mean by that is, as a public defender, I was working a lot with individuals who had been convicted. My clients were all seeking appeals. I was an appellate defender. I would talk to them about what had happened at the trial level because the job of an appellate defender is to help identify any errors that were made at the trial and try to see if you can get them overturned on appeal.

I talked to my clients and so few of them understood what had happened at the trial level, understood what the process was about; they couldn’t help me at all in identifying errors in their trial. And I learned from that many of them felt like they had not been treated fairly because they had not been spoken to directly by their name. They felt like they were disrespected, they didn’t understand what was going on. And so as a trial judge, I spent a lot of time really focusing on communicating with the defendants who came before me. And as a judge now on the appeals level, I think I work on my communication with respect to making sure that lay people, people who are not lawyers, understand what’s going on in our system, because it’s very important for us all to know how the law works, how government works, especially when it’s impacting you in particular.

Miller: You don’t write in depth about too many legal issues in the memoir. You have your opinions for that…

Brown Jackson: Yes, yes.

Miller:…and you’re not alone among justices in not delving deeply into legal issues, but you spend a lot of pages in the book on sentencing. This is something that you also devoted years of your professional life to, so it’s not a mistake. How did you get interested in sentencing?

Brown Jackson: Oh my goodness. Well, actually, I clerked for a Supreme Court Justice. A law clerk is a young lawyer who works with judges in their chambers and helps the judge to write their opinions and prepare for cases. And so my justice, I call them my justice, the justice for whom I clerked, Justice Breyer, actually is the justice I ended up replacing on the Supreme Court, which is kind of interesting. But he was a sentencing expert. He was one of the first people to be appointed to something called the Sentencing Commission, which was created in the 1980s by Congress to develop sentencing policy and help the federal system have a more unified approach to sentencing.

And so he was very interested in sentencing issues. I think that interest and enthusiasm rubbed off on me when I was working for him. An opportunity came available when I was a young lawyer to also work on the staff of the Sentencing Commission and so I was on the Sentencing Commission. And then eventually I got appointed to the Sentencing Commission, but it’s always been a particular interest of mine, understanding how our society goes about determining what is the appropriate punishment for criminal behavior.

Miller: Right, because the first part of your answer is, it’s almost like a kind of an accident of history. You happened to clerk for a particular judge who happened to be an expert in this, but you’re saying that even before that you actually had a personal interest in the issue.

Brown Jackson: So I did. I’ve always been interested in criminal law. You might be referring to the personal family experience that I had when I was a freshman in college. My father’s older brother was arrested and convicted of a drug courier crime. This happened within about, I think it was something like six months or a year of the enactment of a “Three strikes and you’re out” law at the federal level. And it was his third offense, very minor pre-prior offenses, and this one was relatively minor in the overall scheme of things, but he got a life sentence.

I did not really know at the time what was going on. I was away and I didn’t realize that that was the scope of his sentence, but I found out years later when he called me from jail, when I was a federal public defender, and asked if there was anything that could be done and could I help him to look at his materials? And it was the first time that I really got a sense of the impact, the real significant impact of sentencing policy determinations by Congress and by judges.

Miller: And as you write, how capricious it was and how in that case, so based on the bad luck of timing in a lot of different ways.

Brown Jackson: That is correct.

Miller: Let’s take another question from our audience. Go ahead.

Ryan: Hi, my name’s Ryan. My question I have is, what does your day in the life look like as a Supreme Court justice?

Brown Jackson: That’s a great question. It depends, actually. There isn’t really one set of responsibilities that a Supreme Court justice has. It depends on the time of year. So the Supreme Court sits, meaning we’re in session between the first Monday in October and the end of June. During that time, each month, two weeks out of each month, we are actually in court. So if you’re asking me on a court day, it would involve me coming in, preparing myself for the day, get going on the bench.

Sometimes you hear about this, you hear the Supreme Court arguments, the clips, we sit three days a week during those two weeks, and then on the two off-weeks, we are spending most of our time in chambers, working on opinions that have arisen out of the recent oral arguments that we’ve heard, or preparing for the next sitting, the next session. We have to read a lot in order to be prepared to do oral argument. So we have this cycle, that’s kind of on and off. And then of course in the summer, we are traveling, sometimes doing school sessions like this or meeting with various people. So it’s kind of interesting.

Miller: How significantly might a decision change, hinge on, or your ideas of the legal issues change based on oral argument? Because my understanding is that you and your clerks, you’ve got thousands of pages of arguments and motions and such deep, already written things that you pour over, totally separate from and before oral arguments.

Brown Jackson: Yes.

Miller: So maybe that it sounds like a simple question, but I guess it’s an honest one. How big a difference do oral arguments make?

Brown Jackson: So I think it can make a difference, and I’ll tell you why. I mean, you are correct that you go into oral argument very prepared with a pretty good idea of where you stand on the issues because within three or four days of oral argument, we have the vote. So you don’t really have a whole lot of time after oral argument to kind of get your thoughts together. You go into oral argument kind of with a good idea of where you stand. But you don’t know where the other justices stand. We don’t…

Miller: The audience, sorry to interrupt, so the audience to a great extent is your fellow justices at oral argument?

Brown Jackson: To a significant extent, yes, because it’s your first time hearing from them. They’ve been in their chambers and working with their law clerks, preparing their views, and so at oral argument, it’s very interesting. I commend a trip to the court for all of you when you get on the other side of our country coming to Washington, D.C. But we have a bench that is actually winged in its shape, such that you can see every other justice when you’re up there and we are talking obviously to the parties, we’re talking to the people who are listening, but we’re also listening and hearing for the first time what our fellow justices think about these issues through their questions.

Miller: Why not talk to them before?

Brown Jackson: It’s just never been the practice. I mean, there’s no rule against it as far as I know and perhaps, informally justices might engage and our law clerks engage to a certain extent as they’re preparing each of us, but really sitting there when my colleague asks a question, it’s like I go, oh, wait a minute. OK, now I know. And then if I disagree, sometimes I feel like, OK, I need to ask a question that brings out the other side of this issue so that everybody’s clear on the scope of it. Oral argument is my favorite part of the job because it’s very dynamic in that way.

Miller: Let’s hear another question from our audience. What’s your name and what’s your question?

Lupita: Hi, my name is Lupita. My question is, what is the hardest part about making decisions that affect millions of people you’ll never meet?

Brown Jackson: Well, it is a challenge, especially when you are aware of the scope and significance of your decisions. The Supreme Court hears some of the most difficult issues. It really doesn’t come to the Supreme Court if it’s an easy question and so we’re thinking about things that are enormously impactful. And sometimes you’ll hear questions in oral argument and you’ll hear discussions in our opinions about the consequences of the decisions that we render, and I do think it is one of the biggest challenges is to understand and know that the work that you’re doing really actually has an effect on the ground.

Miller: Let’s take another question. Go ahead.

Kenji: My name is Kenji, and my question is, given that many framers of the Constitution didn’t recognize people of color as fully human, why should we follow the document they created?

Brown Jackson: Well, the document they created is the foundation for our system of government. No one is perfect, certainly the framers weren’t, they were human just like all of us, but they had a vision about how our government should be organized and who should run it and it was a vision that was very different at that time. These are folks who had been subject to monarchy, to tyranny. They understood what it meant to live in a country in which people weren’t free.

And the Constitution is the embodiment of the idea of self-governance, that the people themselves are going to be the ones who decide what the policy is and who governs us and so it’s an extraordinarily important document. The principles of the Constitution remain the most innovative and wonderful thing, because they describe our democracy.

Miller: Earlier this week, you had a rare joint appearance with one of your colleagues, Justice Kavanaugh, in which you both spoke publicly about the so-called shadow docket. Can you first just remind us what that is?

Brown Jackson: It’s the term that some have given to one of the ways in which the Supreme Court handles cases. Certain cases, certain issues, are not handled in our ordinary practice but come in through what I refer to as the emergency docket. There are applications from individuals who are seeking to ask the court, usually to stay a lower court ruling, in a case that is still pending before the lower court.

Miller: As opposed to making it sort of its painstaking way through the legal system.

Brown Jackson: Yes. As cases are at different levels, and in the federal system, there are three different levels: the trial court, the court of appeals, and the Supreme Court. And so cases typically just travel through that ordinary course, but in so doing, at each level, the judges are making, in real time, various decisions about different aspects of the proceeding, and some of those decisions are subject to immediate appeal, many are not. So a lot of the calls that a trial court will make are just binding on the parties during the life of that case in the trial court, but some of them can be appealed immediately and stay rulings are that kind of determination.

So the parties, for example, in a trial court, will ask for a preliminary injunction, meaning they will seek to set the status quo in a certain way; please allow for this policy to go into effect right now, for example, is just a hypothetical way of thinking about it, and the trial judge might say yes or no. We’re gonna keep this on hold while we continue to try the case, and that determination then is appealable as to whether or not to allow this policy to go into effect immediately and then eventually that could be appealed to the Supreme Court.

Miller: What do you think is at stake in the expansion of this practice in recent years?

Brown Jackson: Well, I did talk a little bit about this, as you mentioned, with my colleague. We had a lovely session in front of a bunch of judges and lawyers and talked about a lot of things and this was one of them. I think that the practice has changed over time, and that the court is now really seeing a lot more of these requests than it used to get. And I think that we really are in the process of trying to determine how the court is going to handle the increased volume of these kinds of cases.

Miller: OK, let’s take some more questions from our audience.

Milo: Hello, my name is Milo. What was one of the biggest obstacles you faced on your path to becoming a judge and how did you overcome it?

Brown Jackson: Well, I think one of the biggest obstacles was just having to balance everything that was required in my professional life to get to the point of having enough experience and going through enough cases to be a judge, having to balance that with my responsibilities as a mom. What was mentioned earlier is that I have two daughters and they were young when I was trying to do my legal practice, when I first got the opportunity to become a trial judge, and it’s a very, very time-consuming job.

One of my daughters is also autistic and requires a lot of focus and assistance in various ways and so it was a real challenge, I think, for my husband and myself to really want to continue at the pinnacle of our respective careers and be the kinds of parents that we wanted to be. And so I think I just pushed through as so many people do, I picked the right partner. My husband is wonderfully supportive and willing to step in and do the most. As he’s doing now, because I have a very busy day job, and we just took turns, I think, in developing our careers and working on the parenting aspects of our lives.

Miller: You write really movingly about how being the mother to a daughter who’s autistic has changed you. You talked earlier about perseverance and you were raised, and then I think you started to raise your daughters with this explicit… when you hit adversity, just push through it, you can do it. If somebody can do this, you can do this. And then you write that at a certain point that that kind of a line to your daughter, it wasn’t going to work. I’m curious what you’ve learned from her, from being her mother.

Brown Jackson: I’ve learned a lot along those same lines. I absolutely got the message from my parents that you can do anything you want to do if you work hard enough.

Miller: Was the implicit or maybe explicit message that if you’re not succeeding, it’s because you didn’t work hard enough?

Brown Jackson: No, I think my parents really faced a lot of societal obstacles, things that made it hard for them, no matter how hard they worked to succeed. And when I was born, in the first generation right after the civil rights movement, after the end of Jim Crow segregation, they really took it upon themselves to teach me that, no, now you can do whatever you wanna do. Don’t give in to the doubts. Don’t let people tell you that you’re not good enough. And so I really internalized that. I developed a self-esteem that really was focused on my ability to move forward in whatever circumstance.

And I think when I had a daughter who really struggled, and who really wasn’t able, in every situation, to just sit there and do it, it was a real eye-opening learning experience for me. I also have another daughter who had very different needs, and I learned for one thing that not all kids are the same. So they ended up going to different schools their whole lives because you have to meet them where they are, and I learned that there are challenges that sometimes people really are not gonna be able to overcome just from working harder.

Miller: Let’s take another question. Go ahead. What’s your name?

Angel: Oh, hi, I’m Angel, and my question for you would be will you have our community interest in mind when deciding Oregon Supreme Court cases?

Brown Jackson: Community interest, is that what you said?

Angel: Yeah.

Brown Jackson: I think so. I’m trying to understand the import of your question because I wanna answer it correctly.

Angel: Oh yeah, just like the main things that Parkrose believes needs the most change in federal level.

Brown Jackson: Well, I have opinions that I write and I focus on issues that I think need to be changed. I’m one of nine members of the court, and we each get to decide and to vote on the very significant issues that come before us, some of which affect communities, and I hope that I’m doing my job in communicating to people through my opinions what my views are about the issues.

Miller: As I think we’ve mentioned, you can’t comment on issues that could come forward in front of you, you can’t talk about hot button political issues in interview setting, but you can let loose in your opinions and you…

Brown Jackson: Let loose.

Miller: Well, yeah, and you can write forcefully in your opinions. I want to read two sentences from your 2023 dissent in the case that ended race conscious admissions practices in higher education.

You wrote this: “With ‘Let them eat cake’ obliviousness on Thursday, the majority pulls the rip cord and announces color blindness for all by legal fiat, but deeming race irrelevant in law does not make it so in life.” I wanna focus on the writing here, not on the legal questions. What has most shaped you as a writer?

Brown Jackson: I think being a speechwriter. You mentioned earlier, Mrs. Berger and my experiences in high school. I think that learning how words are spoken and received, having to be very, very organized in your presentation in order to be persuasive, and coming up with colorful ways to capture the imagination and the thought processes of those who are your audience comes from having been a speechwriter, and so I try to employ those kinds of techniques in my work today.

Miller: Is there a fellow justice whose writing style you particularly admire, irrespective of their legal reasoning?

Brown Jackson: Many of my colleagues are excellent writers. I think by the time you get to the Supreme Court…

Miller: It’d be a hard job to do if you weren’t a great writer?

Brown Jackson: Absolutely, because you write so much, and people have read your work and have commended you for it in order to put you on the Supreme Court. So I don’t know that I would pick anyone in particular, but pretty much everyone who serves with me now I think is an excellent writer.

Miller: Could you distinguish them if you just read them blind? Would you have a pretty good sense for who wrote what?

Brown Jackson: I think you would. I think if you read enough opinions by a particular justice, you will see their not only thought process, but also cadence. The way in which they write certain things, the way that their sentence length varies. And so I think if you wanted to do a little test…

Miller: I’m not going to test you.

Brown Jackson: …a little test, I could probably figure it out. Yeah.

Miller: Let’s take another question. Go ahead. What’s your name? What’s your question?

Luis: My name is Luis and my question is, does it ever feel awkward with the other judges after disagreeing with each other?

Brown Jackson: That is a great question. It is not awkward, I think, because we compartmentalize very well, as our job requires. You do your best to try to persuade your colleagues when you’re in the meeting where we come together and we decide to vote. And then you have this opportunity to write your own opinion, speaking not mostly to them even, but speaking to the people, explaining your views, and then you move on. We actually have lunches together, we have public events that we attend and go to, and we understand that this is the work that we’ve been called to do and that we have lifetime appointments, so it doesn’t help to hold a grudge, and so you do your best in the circumstance.

Miller: A lot has been made over the years about Justices Ginsburg and Scalia’s friendship.

Brown Jackson: Yes.

Miller: She called him her best buddy, I think, when he died. At an event together, Justice Ginsburg talked about a time when Justice Scalia had showed her his dissenting opinion in a case before she’d finished her majority opinion. She said this, “I took this dissent, this very spicy dissent, and it absolutely ruined my weekend.” But then she added that she made some tweaks to her own argument when she read Scalia’s dissent. Does that happen now?

Brown Jackson: Yes, absolutely. So all of the opinions are actually circulated internally before they’re published. So I don’t know about whether my colleagues share the dissents before the majorities are written. Justice Scalia and Ginsburg had actually been lower court judges on the D.C. Circuit at the same time and had developed a friendship before they’d even come to the Supreme Court. So their relationship is kind of storied in that way. But internally, the majority opinion circulates, and then the dissenting opinion circulates and then you have an opportunity to kind of go back and forth to change your opinion, to respond to the other person or to make changes that make obsolete something that the dissent said or whatever. So absolutely, and I think you make the opinions better by hearing from the other side, on both sides.

Miller: Let’s take another question from the audience. Go ahead.

Elima: Hi, I’m Elima, and I wanted to ask if any of the judges have ever changed their minds about a case due to one of your dissents.

Brown Jackson: Due to one of my dissents, oh, I don’t know that I’m at liberty to say. I don’t know that I know, but I think it is not unusual for a justice to be somewhat tentative in our discussions when we’re first voting. They might say this is a really close case for me personally or whatever, and as a result, I want to wait and hear what everybody else has to say at the conference. And then even at the end, they might say, well, my vote in this is tentative, I need to see how it writes. I need to understand what this looks like as an opinion. And in those kinds of cases, it is not unusual for a justice who might have voted one way in conference to come out the other way or to join the opinion on the other side. So it absolutely happens.

Miller: I’m curious about expanding the time frame there because in that scenario, that sort of hypothetical, it was about a single case with maybe a majority opinion and dissent and how much can you sort of wiggle around a little bit. But how do you think about the longer term picture? As you said, these are all lifetime appointments…

Brown Jackson: Yes.

Miller: …you’re all stuck together for potentially decades and likely decades for some of these relationships. How do you think about swaying the jurisprudence of your colleagues over time?

Brown Jackson: I haven’t really thought about that question before. I can imagine it could happen because you do visit and revisit certain issues over time, and justices are using methodologies that either they’ve developed at the lower courts or they’re developing in real time as justices when they are deciding cases. It’s not sort of a random thing. The justice has an idea of how, for example, they think that statutory interpretation works and they apply that methodology to each case that involves statutory interpretation.

I can imagine that over time people’s methodologies might shift. They might adjust their views of the way in which you go about handling certain issues. That has happened historically, that there have been justices who have started out their careers looking at things in a particular way and have shifted, over time, so I suppose that could happen.

Miller: OK, but it’s not a conscious plan of yours to play a long game of moving people in your direction.

Brown Jackson: No, no, no, no. I mean, I’m doing my best in each case to explain, not only to them but also to the American people, what I think the right result should be and why.

Miller: Let’s take another question from our audience. Go ahead.

Shanice: Hi, I’m Shanice, and I wanted to know, growing up, did you ever have any doubts or even when you work, did you ever have any doubts, and how did you overcome that?

Brown Jackson: Well, yes, I mean, being a young person is a time of doubt and uncertainty because you are facing a lot of new and different challenges. I think that getting into a competitive extracurricular was very helpful for me, and I hear the same is true of people who are, for example, athletes, that when you’re in competition, you start to develop a sense of your own capacity and your ability to make a difference in whatever endeavor you get into and your resilience. And you fail, you fail, you lose, and then you brush yourself off and you get back up and you do it again. And I think that kind of experience was very helpful for me to start overcoming my doubts as a young person.

Miller: As we were talking about, you have to be careful now about what you can talk about as a Supreme Court justice, but I mentioned that you’ve wanted to be a Supreme Court justice for a big chunk of your life and a federal judge as a kind of interim step. Have you had to be careful? Have you thought about being careful over the course of your life so that you wouldn’t have something on your record that would make that harder?

Brown Jackson: I was a kind of nerdy kid. I mean, I didn’t do a whole lot that I think would have been a problem.

Miller: You write that you were risk averse. You were born risk averse.

Brown Jackson: I was very risk averse, as, just an individual, but you’re right that I did have a very early sense that I might want to take this path. It came a little bit from the fact that my father went back to law school when I was young, and my earliest memories are of being on the campus of the University of Miami Law School. My dad’s studying and I’m coloring and we’re together, doing work, so I’d always thought that I could be a lawyer.

And then in middle school, I learned about Constance Baker Motley, who was the first African American female to be appointed to the federal bench, and I thought, wow, I could be a judge, not just a lawyer. And then Sandra Day O’Connor, who became a justice when I was young, and I thought this is amazing. And I do think that somewhere in the back of my mind, being interested in this course made me even more risk averse as I proceeded through college and law school in terms of doing things that could possibly come back and be an impediment to this dream.

Miller: Then again, you became a federal public defender, you worked on the sentencing commission. I mean, I guess there had been a previous justice there, so it’s not like you only pursued professional steps along the way that were obvious paths to becoming a justice.

Brown Jackson: That is true. At the time that I became a federal defender, most judges went through the U.S. Attorney’s Office.

Miller: From the other side.

Brown Jackson: Most people were prosecutors, not criminal defense attorneys. So I suppose that could have been a mistake, but it worked out. I was interested in criminal law and I had a particular interest in criminal defense. And so I think if you do what you want to do, what you think will develop your skill set, you’ll make it to the dream regardless.

Miller: I was struck by something that you write, that your husband told your daughters. You both asked permission, in a sense, for whether you should accept or let your nomination go forward, first for appellate level judge, but certainly for the Supreme Court. And he told them that your becoming a justice would mean that in a sense they would have to share you with the world, that there’d be detractors, but there’d also be people who would develop a real kind of emotional connection to you and that your daughters would have to be OK with that. It was a subtle thing. It sort of took me aback a little bit that that sort of the sophistication of that awareness and then asking permission from your daughters, but I’m curious how you have dealt with that yourself, that having a big swath of progressive America have a kind of parasocial relationship with you.

Brown Jackson: Well, I am truly grateful for the opportunity to do this work, to serve the American people in this job. It is something that comes with the territory, having people who agree with you or what you’re doing, be very excited to see you and to support you in various ways. I’m an introvert, so at times it can be a little overwhelming, but I lean in on what I just think is overwhelming gratitude for the opportunity to serve in this position.

I mentioned Constance Baker Motley, who was not only the first African American female to be appointed to the federal bench, she was also the first to argue cases in the Supreme Court, the first African American woman, she argued something like 10 cases in the Supreme Court, and she won nine of them. And this was in the 1950s and 1960s, and she never had a chance to serve on the Supreme Court because of the times in which she lived. And so I just feel so overwhelmed with gratefulness to have been born when I was born, to get the chance to do this work. And so I appreciate that others are also glad that I’m here doing what I do.

Miller: Let’s squeeze in one more question. Go ahead, quickly.

Deacon English: Hello, I’m Deacon English. I’m a senior here. First off, theatre kid to theatre kid, congratulations on your performance in “&Juliet.”

Brown Jackson: Thank you!

English: Such an impressive musical. Oftentimes Gen Z is told to speak out and use our voice, but usually we’re met with silence from those in power. What are some true steps and actions the younger generation can take to be seen and heard by those who hold high office?

Brown Jackson: Oh my goodness, wow. That’s a great question. I think you need to stay engaged. One thing you should not do is be discouraged by the older generation and their, what you say is, attempts to not include you or not listen to you, just keep being persistent because it’s very important, what you have to say and what you have to offer. I think you also want to take every opportunity to practice developing your own skills. You do that in the context of the work that you do in your classes every day, but also in whatever extracurricular activities you undertake.

You can do that by attending community meetings. You can do that by showing up at their offices and asking for meetings. Don’t be turned away because you all are the next generation. You all are going to be receiving the baton and having to lead us all and so really the older generation should be invested in making sure that you are prepared to do that and you can help by preparing yourself.

Miller: Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, thank you very much.

Brown Jackson: Thank you. It’s great.

Miller: Thanks as well to librarian Anne Winnicour, to Olivia Jones Hall Literary Arts, and especially to our fantastic student audience.

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