By Joan Biskupic, CNN Chief Supreme Court Analyst
(CNN) — Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson over the past two years has been nearly as visible on the book circuit as she has been at the Supreme Court, recounting her personal struggles and professional successes and emphasizing that she is the embodiment of her “ancestors’ dreams.”
As she joined former first lady Michelle Obama and her brother Craig Robinson for their popular “IMO” podcast this summer, Robinson referred to Jackson as the first African American woman on the court and held up her book, “Lovely One.”
But as he did, Robinson mistakenly said, “The Lonely One.”
The momentary blip — he sheepishly corrected himself — captured Jackson more than her hosts likely realized.
Now entering her fifth term on the Supreme Court, Jackson has taken an approach that in many ways has isolated her from her colleagues — stylistically and on the substance of the law. At the same time, she is reframing how the justices might look to the past to interpret the Constitution.
Jackson has bucked internal court norms and consumed disproportionate time during oral-arguments, producing a palpable chill from colleagues used to more solicitude during the Q-and-A. She has bluntly challenged the integrity of the conservative justices as they have sided with the White House. Her fellow liberals have declined to sign onto her most lacerating opinions.
In an August controversy over mail-in ballots, she made a bold assertion about where the court majority might be headed in Trump-related election litigation. She faulted conservatives for “a blinders-on approach” to the administration and declared, “the majority misses the Government’s actual objective: to secure our imprimatur for its effort to foment chaos ahead of the November elections.”
When the majority last year let the Trump administration block nearly $800 million in research grants awarded by the National Institutes of Health, Jackson wrote: “This is Calvinball jurisprudence with a twist. Calvinball has only one rule: There are no fixed rules. We seem to have two: that one, and this Administration always wins.”
CNN spoke with more than 20 people who have closely followed Jackson’s work on the court as admirers, as critics and as confidants. Those most intimate to Jackson or other justices sought to speak without being identified because of the nature of their personal assessments. There is division among even liberals over whether Jackson’s methods, particularly as she publicly impugns conservatives’ integrity, are alienating and counterproductive.
Those closest to Jackson say she is not oblivious to the hard feelings she has generated. They say she is moving intentionally, speaking to an audience beyond the bench, stressing what she sees as threats to democracy.
Such tendencies have preoccupied people in the court’s orbit. Yet other justices have broken various conventions over the years, eliciting their own share of public scrutiny. A few supporters suggest Jackson draws criticism simply because she is a Black woman in public life, a point that emerged during her 2022 Senate confirmation hearings.
More importantly on the law, Jackson has set herself apart in her approach to the Constitution. She has made it a mission to counter the conservative majority’s “originalist” approach with her distinctive views on how constitutional provisions were understood at the time of their adoption. She has drawn attention to the role of Black Americans in the history of the Constitution’s Reconstruction-era amendments.
That was seen most recently in a June opinion centered on the 14th Amendment, as the majority struck down Trump’s effort to restrict birthright citizenship.
“In the decades leading up to the ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment, Black Americans organized and gathered at more than 600 local and national conventions across the country,” she wrote in a concurring opinion. “There, delegates erected the political and intellectual scaffolding for the Fourteenth Amendment and, later, for the Black Civil Rights Movement more generally.”
Jackson plainly has her eye on a future Supreme Court, one in which she would not be one of only three liberals on the nine-member bench.
“You’re thinking about people who will eventually agree with your viewpoint,” the 56-year-old justice said about her dissents in May.
Such an attitude is not unlike that of the late Justice Antonin Scalia or current Justice Clarence Thomas, who honed dissents in the niches of the law, becoming more influential as conservatism has made inroads at all levels of the judiciary.
“She knows she is not going to prevail in many cases,” said Professor Carolyn Shapiro at the Chicago-Kent College of Law. “But she also expects to be there a long time. And in those ways, she is not so different from how Justice Scalia and Justice Thomas were. They just kept at it. Much of what they were promoting is the law now.”
The right-wing views of Scalia, who served from 1986 until his 2016 death, and Thomas, who joined in 1991 and is still sitting, were once considered radical, for example, against longstanding abortion rights and entrenched gun control. Such views now dominate, because of a succession of likeminded appointees, three from Trump’s first term.
“When she uses terms like ‘Calvinball,’” added Shapiro, who, like Jackson, was once a law clerk to Justice Stephen Breyer, “she is not just speaking to her colleagues. She is speaking to the public.”
Joining a superminority
Jackson’s uncompromising attitude may be traced partly to her circumstances.
Appointed in 2022 by then-President Joe Biden to succeed the retiring Breyer, Jackson is the first liberal to join a court so lopsidedly conservative in decades. (The conservative supermajority was sealed by Trump’s 2020 appointment of Amy Coney Barrett to replace the late liberal Ruth Bader Ginsburg.)
Before then, even as liberals were in the minority, the left had four reliable votes and needed to persuade only one of the right-of-center justices to prevail. The once-crucial center, which variously tilted left, then right, over the years, has all but disappeared.
Jackson’s more senior liberal colleagues, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan, appointed in 2009 and 2010, respectively, maneuvered for most of their tenure on 5-to-4 courts. Even as they had denounced right-wing rulings, they have continued to operate more strategically among colleagues to try to find some consensus.
“This is the first left-of-center justice in decades who is taking a bold approach,” Jon Greenbaum of the progressive Washington-based Justice Legal Strategies told CNN. “Justice Jackson in a lot of these cases is not concerned about counting to five.”
Jackson’s rhetorical missives recall Scalia, a conservative icon whose attention-getting put-downs and sarcastic asides ensured his dissenting views would circulate widely — even as they alienated colleagues.
Other new appointees have flexed their individuality in a host of ways, whether in declining to put their law clerks in the “cert pool” that collectively screens incoming petitions, or in their dealings with colleagues. When he began in 2017, Justice Neil Gorsuch’s tone toward other justices made him appear to some commentators as a smug norm-breaker.
“He’s the new kid in class with his hand always up, the boy on the playground who snatches the ball out of turn,” Linda Greenhouse wrote in the New York Times of Gorsuch. “He is in his colleagues’ faces pointing out the error of their ways, his snarky tone oozing disrespect toward those who might, just might, know what they are talking about.”
Gorsuch succeeded Scalia, a justice of many idiosyncrasies, as well as distinctive legal philosophy.
Scalia was so angered by the majority’s 2015 decision to declare a right to same-sex marriage that he refused to eat lunch with his colleagues for some time. Retired Justice Anthony Kennedy, who authored the decision, revealed in his memoir last year that Scalia also barely spoke to him after the June 2015 ruling, reconciling only right before his February 2016 death.
Expanding the court’s understanding of history
Most of the conservative justices engage in an originalist approach popularized by Scalia that looks, with some variation, to what they believe was the public understanding of constitutional guarantees when they were adopted.
Jackson has tried to expand the notion of whose views should be examined.
“She had brought to the court this idea that if we’re going to look to text and history, we have to look to the whole public and the views of marginalized communities,” said David Gans of the Constitutional Accountability Center. “That has changed the dynamic, even though she’s only one vote and is often in dissent.”
Her emphasis on the historical record regarding Black Americans emerged in her first term when the court overturned race-based policies to enhance diversity in higher education, said Touro Law Professor Tiffany Graham.
“She was not just talking about race-based affirmative action being constitutional,” said Graham of Jackson’s dissenting position. “She was giving the historical account of Reconstruction and what was promised to the former slaves. She was suggesting that you can’t speak coherently about racial neutrality when one of the purposes of the 14th Amendment was to secure the rights of former slaves.”
In that case, centered on Harvard and the University of North Carolina, Jackson refuted the majority’s insistence on a “colorblind” Constitution.
“Our country has never been colorblind,” wrote Jackson, who is only the third Black justice, following Thomas and Thurgood Marshall (who served from 1967 to 1991). She referred to “the well-documented intergenerational transmission of inequality that still plagues our citizenry.”
Earlier this year, when the court struck down the Trump plan to restrict birthright citizenship under the 14th Amendment, Jackson specifically looked to the experiences of Black Americans in the era.
In a portion of her concurring opinion, she referred to the “Delegates to the Colored Conventions” and their commitment to “universal liberty and equality interests” that would sweep to all people born on US soil.
She also specifically criticized Thomas for his view that the 14th Amendment’s citizenship clause was enacted for freed slaves and therefore would not prevent Trump’s restrictions for children born here of non-citizens.
Thomas did not single out Jackson but said of the majority, “the Court adds to the sad history of the Fourteenth Amendment, which was designed and understood to secure equal rights for the freed blacks but has instead been repurposed for political projects that the Reconstruction Congress did not support.”
(Jackson declined a request from CNN for an interview. Thomas did not respond to questions related to Jackson.)
Clashes with fellow justices
Jackson’s alternative approach to constitutional interpretation has emerged in a range of cases. When the majority restricted lower court judges’ ability to impose nationwide injunctions against potentially unconstitutional presidential actions in 2025, Jackson clashed with Justice Amy Coney Barrett, whose majority opinion looked back to the practices of the High Court of Chancery in England.
“We must therefore ask whether universal injunctions are sufficiently ‘analogous’ to the relief issued ‘by the High Court of Chancery in England at the time of the adoption of the Constitution and the enactment of the original Judiciary Act,’” Barrett wrote. “The answer is no: Neither the universal injunction nor any analogous form of relief was available in the High Court of Chancery in England at the time of the founding.”
Jackson dissented with fellow liberals, signing onto a statement by Sotomayor. But then she wrote a separate opinion:“The Founders of the United States of America squarely rejected a governing system in which the King ruled all, and all others, including the courts, were his subordinates. In our Constitution-centered system, the People are the rulers and we have the rule of law. So, it makes little sense to look to the relationship between English courts and the King for guidance on the power of our Nation’s Judiciary vis-à-vis its Executive.”
Barrett brushed off Jackson’s approach, asserting, “We will not dwell on Justice Jackson’s argument, which is at odds with more than two centuries’ worth of precedent, not to mention the Constitution itself. We observe only this: Justice Jackson decries an imperial Executive while embracing an imperial Judiciary.”
Jackson’s pattern of adding an extra dissent from the liberal bloc breaks custom. In the past, liberal dissenters tried to sign a single forceful opinion, assigned by the senior justice among them. The late Justice Ginsburg was particularly adamant about the “I write, you sign” practice when she was the senior justice on the left. Justice Kagan has made a practice of following Sotomayor’s assignment and not separately dissenting.
A year before the controversy over nationwide injunctions against Trump policies, the justices heard a more important case testing presidential power. The conservative majority in an opinion by Chief Justice Roberts gave Trump substantial immunity from criminal prosecution and bolstered “conclusive and preclusive” powers for the executive.
Sotomayor wrote the main dissent, a stinging 30 pages, signed by Kagan and Jackson.
Jackson insisted on adding more: “to explain, as succinctly as I can, the theoretical nuts and bolts of what, exactly, the majority has done today to alter the paradigm of accountability for Presidents of the United States.” She also likened the majority’s position to “a five-alarm fire,” and mocked what she called Roberts’ “feigned judicial humility.”
Roberts responded in his opinion to both dissents, particularly deriding Jackson’s for “models and paradigms of its own concoction.”
Jackson has not spared fellow liberals her criticism, faulting them at times for compromising. One instance occurred when Sotomayor and Kagan joined with Barrett, Roberts and Justice Brett Kavanaugh in a 2024 dispute from Idaho involving abortion access.
The case arose two years after the court majority had struck down nearly a half century of abortion rights, and it appeared the majority was ready to further limit abortion access, specifically in emergency rooms. In dispute was a Biden administration policy covering public hospital emergency rooms. It preempted state abortion bans when a pregnant women experiencing complications needed the procedure for stabilizing care.
There were some factual discrepancies over when physicians would be allowed to perform emergency abortions that arguably warranted returning the case to lower courts, and key justices negotiated a dismissal.
Dissenting, Jackson wrote, “It is too little, too late for the Court to take a mulligan and just tell the lower courts to carry on as if none of this has happened. … There is simply no good reason not to resolve this conflict now.”
Except that her liberal colleagues thought there was a good reason. If the full merits of the case had been heard, they might have been on the losing end of another reproductive rights controversy. Instead, the result was a partial victory for liberals.
Tapping the chair
In Jackson’s conversation with Obama and Robinson, the justice was upbeat. She regaled them with stories from her childhood, her high school debate success, her Harvard experience where she met her future husband, all tied to the memoir she began writing as soon as she joined the court. It was published in 2024, and according to her financial disclosure forms she had made more than $4 million from it so far.
Jackson, who served on US district and appellate courts before her 2022 appointment, has turned more somber in other appearances, as last year at a legal conference in Indianapolis. When asked what keeps her up at night, she said, “The state of our democracy.” She has made clear in her writing that she believes the Trump administration is a serious threat that must constantly be called out.
(For his part, Trump, who has often disparaged Black women, referred to Jackson in April as “that new, Low IQ person, that somehow found her way to the bench.”)
Regarding life at the Supreme Court, Jackson tells audiences the justices have cordial relationships and have “learned to disagree without being disagreeable.”
Any small group dynamic has its personal differences and quirks. Earlier this year, Chief Justice Roberts told a judicial conference that he was trying to figure out how to shorten justices’ oral arguments, which were carrying on for “too long.” Roberts did not mention Jackson, but she has been the main cause of the protracted sessions since she joined the bench. (During this first month of the 2026-27 session, all justices, including Jackson, seemed slightly more mindful of time.)
Roberts has shown that he is aware of navigating among his colleagues, over differences large and small.
It can sometimes be “the little things,” he said last year at a Georgetown Law School appearance.
“I mean, if you’re sitting next to somebody, and you just can’t stand the way he or she kind of taps the chair, you’re thinking, ‘OK, we’ll be here together for 20 years.’ And you know, I’ve got to decide, am I going to tell her to stop doing that, or am I going to just get over it, or what?”
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