Who Is Ketanji Onyika Brown Jackson? Biden’s Nominee for Supreme Court

Today, President Joe Biden nominated Judge Ketanji Onyika Brown Jackson to become the 116th Associate Justice of the United States Supreme Court.

Jackson was born in Washington, DC and grew up in Miami, Florida. Her parents started their careers as public school teachers and became leaders and administrators in the Miami-Dade Public School System. When Judge Jackson was in preschool, her father attended law school. In a 2017 lecture, Judge Jackson traced her love of the law back to sitting next to her father in their apartment as he tackled his law school homework—reading cases and preparing for Socratic questioning—while she undertook her preschool homework—coloring books.

Judge Jackson stood out as a high achiever throughout her childhood. She was a speech and debate star who was elected “mayor” of Palmetto Junior High and student body president of Miami Palmetto Senior High School. When Judge Jackson told her high school guidance counselor she wanted to attend Harvard, the guidance counselor warned that Judge Jackson should not set her “sights so high.”

She graduated magna cum laude from Harvard University, then attended Harvard Law School, where she graduated cum laude and was an editor of the Harvard Law Review. She served as Justice Breyer’s law clerk after graduation before becoming a Public Defender. She also served as the Vice Chair of the U.S. Sentencing Commission in 2009, and was confirmed with bipartisan support in 2010. In 2021, she was confirmed to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit.

Judge Jackson lives with her husband, Patrick, and their two daughters, in Washington, DC.