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President Joe Biden nominated on Friday Ketanji Brown Jackson, judge of the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia, as his nominee to fill the vacancy in the Supreme Court of the country.
Ketanji Brown Jackson is finally Biden’s choice over other candidates such as J. Michelle Childs or Leondra Kruger, the other two best positioned for the position.
After graduating cum laude from Harvard University, Jackson developed a varied career – she even clerked for Justice Breyer, whom she is set to replace – and since last year has been a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia, considered the second most important court in the country and a stepping stone to the Supreme Court.
The two years she spent as a court-appointed lawyer for low-income people would make her, if she reaches the Supreme Court, the first female judge with that kind of experience in more than three decades.
Jackson also served on the Sentencing Commission to reduce sentences for most federal drug trafficking offenses. It’s an issue she knows firsthand: her uncle was sentenced to life in prison for a nonviolent drug crime, though he was released in 2017 and died shortly thereafter.
