Ketanji Jackson’s new autobiography: a snapshot full of optimism and grit
BOOK REVIEW
Jackson delivered remarks at an April 2022 event celebrating her confirmation to be a Supreme Court Justice. (Official White House photo by Adam Schultz via Wikimedia commons)
At the swearing-in ceremony for the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, Ketanji Brown Jackson joked, “It takes village to raise a Judge.” Jackson’s memoir, “Lovely One,” – the English translation of both her first and middle name, Ketanji, – pays tribute to many of the family and mentors that 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 schools. Her parents also attended segregated school. Jackson’s maternal grandpa was initially a chauffeur for wealthy white families, but he became tired of it. Jackson recalls that he often had to sleep in his car when traveling with the wealthy white families for whom he worked and depended on his employers to provide him food. He started his own landscaping company. He sent all five 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 describes being closely followed in stores by salespeople even when her white friends were not. She wrote that she learned over time to zip up any bags before entering a store and to keep my hands visible. 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. What began as a friendship soon turned into romance. 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 tributes to her mentors such as Judge Patti Saris who was the federal trial judge she clerked for during her first year after law school and Fran Berger the coach of her high school debate team, where a teenager Jackson found community and self-confidence in a predominantly White school. Jackson recounts her experiences that led to the time she spent as a law clerk for Justice Stephen Breyer. She would later succeed him on the Supreme Court. Jackson’s path to the Supreme Court clerkship was simpler than many other students who spend a lot of time and effort trying to get into elite law schools. She received a call in the spring of 99 from an anonymous former professor suggesting she apply for the position with Breyer, which would begin 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. She then moved on to become a lawyer with 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 first diagnosed with epilepsy as a child, and then later as being on 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
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. She writes, “We all trusted that God would make sure that I served our country in this way one day.” 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, with Jackson and her liberal colleagues in dissent, the court struck down Harvard’s and University of North Carolina’s consideration of race in their undergraduate admissions programs. Jackson mentions that she attended predominantly white middle and high school. 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.”[her grandmother]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. She explains that she wanted her law clerks to watch the show to give them context for the debate going on among legal scholars and judges about how much history should be used to interpret the law. Jackson shares her story at the beginning of the memoir, telling how she first thought about becoming a lawyer when she was four years old. She was sitting at the kitchen counter while her father did his homework. She was already a teenager when she first read about Motley and was inspired by Sandra Day O’Connor’s appointment as the first woman Supreme Court justice. Jackson devotes a small amount of space to her time as a student at Harvard Law School. She notes that her first year lived up to its reputation as a “relentless and demoralizing grind”. There are very few details about the classes she took, legal theories she was exposed to, or professors she learned from. 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 she was inspired as a child by Judge Constance Motley, and she hopes her story will “open up a door for those who may one day want to become judges, extending the chains of possibility and purpose in the life of the law and lifting us on the rising tides of their dreams.” 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. Jackson keeps her concerns about joining a court that she would be likely to dissent in many high-profile case for the foreseeable, as she did in her first two terms. She ends her letter on a positive note, stating that “God provided me with all I could ever need to face this moment.” She also mentions her extraordinary family and close friends. I have the privilege to serve others by defending Constitution and rule of law. “And I have art.” How much more beautiful can a single life be?
