President Joe Biden has kept one of his many campaign promises.
With Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer’s retirement, Biden has nominated the first Black woman to sit on the nation’s most-revered bench. Ketanji Brown Jackson has reportedly been nominated to fill the role, according to multiple reports.
Brown, 51, currently sits on Washington, D.C.’s federal appellate court. President Barack Obama appointed her to the federal district court in D.C. before Biden promoted her to the circuit court last year.
On his campaign trail in Iowa in the summer of 2020, Biden promised to nominate the first Black woman to the Supreme Court if given the opportunity during his Presidential term.
Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson received her commission as a United States Circuit Judge in June of 2021. From 2013 until 2021, she served a United States District Judge, and until December of 2014, she also served as a Vice Chair and Commissioner on the United States Sentencing Commission.
Prior to her four years of service on the Sentencing Commission, Judge Jackson worked for three years as Of Counsel at Morrison & Foerster LLP, with a practice that focused on criminal and civil appellate litigation in both state and federal courts, as well as cases in the Supreme Court of the United States. Before joining Morrison & Foerster LLP, Judge Jackson served as an Assistant Federal Public Defender in the appeals division of the Office of the Federal Public Defender in the District of Columbia. Before that appointment, Judge Jackson worked as an Assistant Special Counsel at the Sentencing Commission and as an associate with two law firms (one specializing in white-collar criminal defense, and the other focusing on the negotiated settlement of mass-tort claims). Judge Jackson also served as a law clerk to three federal judges: Associate Justice Stephen G. Breyer of the Supreme Court of the United States, Judge Bruce M. Selya of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit, and Judge Patti B. Saris of the U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts.
Judge Jackson is currently a member of the Judicial Conference Committee on Defender Services, as well as the Board of Overseers of Harvard University and the Council of the American Law Institute. She also currently serves on the board of Georgetown Day School and the United States Supreme Court Fellows Commission.
Judge Jackson received a J.D., cum laude, from Harvard Law School in 1996, where she served as a supervising editor of the Harvard Law Review. She received an A.B., magna cum laude, in Government from Harvard-Radcliffe College in 1992.
