Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson of the U.S. Supreme Court is many things. The first black woman to sit on the Court. An inspiration to middling intellects everywhere. Most of all: a consummate theater kid.
“New Justices tend to hang back; Jackson, now in her third term, spoke up from the start,” a glowing profile from the New Yorker reads. “In her first eight oral arguments, she spoke eleven thousand words, twice as many as the next most loquacious Justice, Sotomayor.”
Jackson betrays no signs of changing course. The New Yorker refers to an analysis from The Hill, which found that Jackson blathered away 75,535 words during oral arguments this term. That’s over 50% more than any of her colleagues.
https://t.co/L3BT1o8xBK pic.twitter.com/HV4c8Pxt4N
— Daily Caller (@DailyCaller) June 27, 2025
Jackson is also unusual in her volume of dissents. The New Yorker cites The New York Times, which notes that Chief Justice John Roberts “did not write his first solo dissent in an argued case until 16 years into his tenure. Justice Jackson issued three such dissents in her first term.”
The outlet offers no consideration to why other justices may be less loquacious, particularly early in their tenure. Jackson’s break from precedent is hailed as “assertiveness.” Talk may be a measure of self-confidence, but it’s no measure of legal ability. Tradition would hold that brevity is, at the very least, the soul of wit.
But leftists have difficulty with tradition. Tradition, in G.K. Chesterton’s words, “is the democracy of the dead. It means giving a vote to the most obscure of all classes: our ancestors.” The left cannot produce an accurate mental model of a modern conservative, much less an accurate mental model of a person living many decades or centuries ago. They care not for the votes of their own ancestors. They certainly do not care for the votes of other people’s ancestors.
🚨BREAKING🚨 The Supreme Court sided with the Trump administration in its requests to partially enforce its birthright citizenship order.
6-3 decision. pic.twitter.com/cOyqHFAywR
— Daily Caller (@DailyCaller) June 27, 2025
“Tradition refuses to submit to the small and arrogant oligarchy of those who merely happen to be walking around,” Chesterton continues.
Small and arrogant are apt adjectives for Jackson. Her dissents are argued so poorly, so brashly, and with such little regard for the Constitution, they’ve earned the ire of multiple fellow justices.
“As [Jackson] sees things, we are all inexorably trapped in a fundamentally racist society, with the original sin of slavery and the historical subjugation of Black Americans still determining our lives today,” Justice Clarence Thomas writes of Jackson’s dissent in Students for Fair Admissions, Inc. v. President and Fellows of Harvard College. Jackson “would replace the second Founders’ vision with an organizing principle based on race,” Thomas claims. “In fact, on her view, almost all of life’s outcomes may be unhesitatingly ascribed to race.”
Justice Amy Coney Barrett outright dismissed Jackson’s dissent in Trump vs. CASA, Inc.
“We will not dwell on [Jackson’s] argument, which is at odds with more than two centuries’ worth of precedent, not to mention the Constitution itself,” Barrett writes. “We observe only this: [Jackson] decries an imperial Executive while embracing an imperial Judiciary.” (RELATED: Amy Coney Barrett Goes Right At The Jugular Of Biden’s DEI SCOTUS Justice)
The barrage of rebukes does not appear to have dented Jackson’s self-esteem.
“Perhaps it is my general outspokenness on and sometimes off the bench. I am also told that some people think I am courageous for the ways in which I engage with litigants and my colleagues in the courtroom,” she said in an acceptance speech for the Harry S. Truman Good Neighbor Award, according to The Hill.
Appearing in a queer-ified take on Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet does not speak to Jackson’s courage, so much as abominable judgement – a fairly damning quality for a Supreme Court justice.
Jackson once dreamed of being a Broadway star. She writes of her “unabashed love of theater” in her memoir, going so far as to include the passion in a supplemental Harvard application essay: “I expressed that I wished to attend Harvard as I believed it might help me ‘to fulfill my fantasy of becoming the first Black, female Supreme Court justice to appear on a Broadway stage.’”
Jackson even delivers her dissents in the style of a wannabe playwright: “To the majority, the power-hungry actors are . . . (wait for it) . . . the district courts,” she writes in Trump vs. CASA, Inc. Ellipses not mine.
Justice has always been a stepping stone to the spotlight for Jackson. She’s now fulfilled her dream – at the cost of casting herself as comic relief.
Follow Natalie Sandoval on X: @NatalieIrene03
