As she struggled to care for a child with special needs, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson said in a wide-ranging interview with CNN on Friday that she felt “inadequate” at the time and might have given up her demanding legal career if she had initially understood the extent of her daughter’s challenges.
Speaking with CNN’s Abby Phillip, Jackson said that she and her family “struggled” to understand what her eldest daughter, Talia, needed and that there were moments when she felt she wasn’t meeting expectations at home or at the large Boston law firm she had joined shortly after earning her law degree.
“We struggled, when she was young, trying to really understand what she needed,” Jackson said, noting that her family didn’t receive a diagnosis for Talia until years later. “I think if I had known earlier, I probably would have just decided that I needed to care for her full time.”
In a memoir published this month, “Lovely One,” the newest justice on the Supreme Court tells a relatable narrative of a young family juggling high-pressure careers while raising two daughters. Talia was academically gifted but struggled with social interactions and transitions at school, Jackson writes, and was diagnosed at 11 with mild autism spectrum disorder.
Jackson, who turns 54 on Saturday, reflected on that challenging period in the CNN interview. Despite times of uncertainty, Jackson said she believes she ultimately made the right decisions.
“It’s hard to look back and feel regret,” said Jackson, whom President Joe Biden nominated to the Supreme Court in 2022. “I really wanted people to know that you can reach success – you can do things that you’ve dreamed about doing – even if you have challenges in your family.”
And Talia, Jackson said, is “at a good place now.”
At Harvard
The first Black woman to serve on the nation’s highest court, Jackson writes in the memoir how she came of age at the dawn of the post-Civil Rights era, with a family that impressed upon her the significance of the moment for African Americans.
“Race has played a significant role in who I am and who I’ve become,” Jackson told CNN.
Raised in Miami, Jackson discussed her transition from a mostly White high school to Harvard, where she encountered other Black students.
“It really was a way to allow me, I think, to bond with people who understood my background, my interests, my issues,” Jackson said. “When I got to Harvard and there were a number of Black students in the classes, I felt, I want to say, empowered, in a way, to be myself.”
“It felt like being me in a real way,” she added.
On the bench
Asked if the court’s blockbuster 2023 decision ending affirmative action at Harvard and the University of North Carolina had made things worse for today’s Black students, Jackson demurred, saying she hadn’t studied that issue closely. Jackson dissented in one of those cases and recused herself from the one involving Harvard, because she had previously served on the school’s board of overseers.
Jackson said she was “flattered” that conservative Justice Clarence Thomas, the other Black justice on the court, laid out a detailed disagreement with her dissent in the case.
“In one way, I think I was flattered,” Jackson said, “because it meant I must have been making points that were worth responding to.”
Jackson joined the bench in 2022, weeks after the decision to overturn Roe v. Wade thrust the court into the center of American politics. Public polling indicates that faith in the court has slipped considerably since that decision – particularly on the left. Jackson acknowledged the concern that a growing portion of the public feels that politics has influenced the court’s decisions.
“I think it is a concern for the court as an institution because public confidence is basically all we have,” Jackson said. “At a sort of institutional level, the entire court is concerned about that.”
Jackson noted the importance of precedent for restraining the judiciary and ensuring that the public sees the law as consistent. Every time the court overturns a precedent, she said, “we have to think carefully about settled expectations, which is one of the criteria that we look at to determine whether or not this is going to impact the public and if so, how so.”
Jackson declined to reflect on whether a future court might revisit a constitutional right to abortion.
“I’m not going to predict what would happen in the future,” she said.
Jackson also addressed her decision to join with several of the court’s conservatives this year in a case involving rioters at the US Capitol on January 6, 2021. A majority of the court limited the power of prosecutors to pursue obstruction charges against those who took part.
She described it as not a hard decision.
“I ruled in that case consistent with what I believe the law required,” Jackson told CNN. “That’s the way that I look at statutory interpretation, regardless of what the politics might say about the situation.”
