Ketanji Brown Jackson’s Heterodox Critiques of SCOTUS’s Right Wing
“Our interpretative task is not to seek our own desired results (whatever they are),” said Jackson. “And, in fact, it is precisely because of this solemn duty that, in my opinion, it is imperative that we interpret coherent laws with all the relevant clues of what the Congress wanted, as best we can determine its intention. A methodology which includes the consideration of the objectives of the congress does exactly that – and no more. ”
Most judges would likely have stopped there, but Jackson went further to criticize textualism as a whole. “By” finding “answers in an ambiguous text and not bothering to determine whether these answers align with other statutory sense sources, pure textualists can easily hide their own preferences as” textual “inevitables”, she explained. “So, really, far from being” insufficiently flexible “, I think that pure textualism is constantly malleable – it is its main problem – and, indeed, it is certainly quite flexible to guarantee the desired result of the majority.”
This border is not unprecedented among the judges of the Supreme Court. Sotomayor and Judge Elena Kagan have both denigrated philosophies and legal objectives, although less directly. (Sotomayor, who joined most of Jackson’s dissent in the Ada case, did not join his footnote on the “desired result” of the majority.) Although these examples can be found sporadically throughout their mandates on the bench, Jackson’s approach is more and more like the norm. All the cases I mention in this article come from this term.
To this end, it is more like the contempt that the conservative judges of the court have once piled up on the liberal and moderate majority of the court. Judges like Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas are used to frequently supporting in the defeat that the majority was not only wrong due to legal reasoning, but that all his case law was a vehicle for their personal political preferences to abortion, LGBT rights, criminal justice, etc. Now the VER has turned.
