By Cash Michaels
Contributing writer
Outspoken Associate Justice Ketanji Onyika Brown Jackson, 54, the first African-American woman ever to serve on the U.S. Supreme Court, and one of that body’s three liberal member minority, is scheduled to speak at North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University next week on Wednesday, Sept. 3rd at 6 p.m..
The event will be held in the school’s Harrison Auditorium, and is restricted to NC A&T students, faculty and staff.
Justice Jackson’s appearance is part of her current tour to support her New York Times #1 bestselling book “Lovely One.” The memoir chronicles her early life growing up in Miami, Florida, going on to earn her bachelor’s and law degrees from Harvard, becoming a federal public defender and ultimately being appointed by Pres. Joe Biden to the U.S. high court in 2022 after serving as U.S. District Court judge for the District of Columbia.
Her father, Johnny Brown, attended North Carolina Central University, graduating with a degree in history, and later serving as a school principal.
Beyond her chart-topping book, Justice Jackson is very much in the news lately for her fiery dissenting opinions on the 6-3 conservative majority Supreme Court.
Just last week on the Supreme Court’s last day of its current term, in a split decision on the emergency docket where the conservative majority voted, without argument, to allow Republican Pres. Donald Trump to cancel almost $800 million in federal National Institutes of Health grants for medical and scientific research, Justice Jackson, calling the majority’s decision “of a piece with the Court’s recent tendencies, added, “‘[R]ight when the Judiciary should be hunkering down to do all it can to preserve the law’s constraints,’ the Court opts instead to make vindicating the rule of law and preventing manifestly injurious Government action as difficult as possible.”
“This is Calvinball jurisprudence with a twist. Justice Jackson continued, referring to a children’s comic strip game. “Calvinball has only one rule: There are no fixed rules. We seem to have two: that one, and this Administration always wins.”
Justice Jackson concluded, “The court’s Calvinball jurisprudence will have grim consequences.The forward march of scientific discovery will not only be halted — it will be reversed. That’s what happens when you make up the rules as you go to help your side win.”
Knowing that sometimes strong dissenting court opinions can sometimes have as much social impact as majority opinions, Justice Jackson has made clear that she is not afraid to use her voice. She has not been afraid to chide the court’s conservative majority for for strengthening and extending Pres. Trump’s executive powers, even ruling that he enjoys immunity from prosecution for most crimes committed while in office.
In July during an appearance hosted by the Indianapolis Bar Association, when asked “What keeps you up at night?,” Justice Jackson replied, “I would say the state of our democracy.”
“I’m really very interested in getting people to focus …and to pay attention to what is happening in our country and in our government,” Justice Jackson added.
