Ketanji Brown Jackson Confirmation Hearings: Live Stream and Discussion

From PBS:

The confirmation hearings for Ketanji Brown Jackson, President Biden’s nominee to be an Associate Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, are expected to begin Monday, March 21 at 11 a.m. ET with opening statements. If confirmed by the Senate, Judge Jackson – a Harvard graduate who currently serves on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit – would become the first Black woman to serve on the Supreme Court.

Our own Em Carpenter wrote a bit about the reaction to Judge Jackson’s nomination:

Some lawyers, during their careers, find themselves the mouthpiece for some seriously repugnant people. Harvey Weinstein had counsel, as did Jeffrey Dahmer and Tim McVeigh and any number of other horrid excuses for humanity. And thank goodness they did; just imagine how much prosecutors could get away with if there was no lawyer on the other side? And what can (should) happen when prosecutors break the rules? It’s that thing we so often hear about: the bad guy “gets off on a technicality”.

Just imagine that you somehow find yourself charged with the most heinous, disgusting crime you can think of. You’re the accused in a case that made the front page, the type of case prompting a mob of torches and pitchforks outside the jail calling for your immediate hanging. Only thing is, you didn’t do it. Or it was an accident. Or any of a hundred other possibly mitigating things. The public doesn’t know that or care to hear that; all that matters is that you are accused of this horrific thing and they all want you under the jail for it. Now imagine that no one will help you. No lawyer is willing to protect your rights because the thing you are accused of is just so terrible and you are so loathed. You are on your own before the court with no legal knowledge beyond that which you learned from Jack McCoy or Ben Matlock. You have no way to call witnesses, to point out when the prosecutor is breaking the rules or any ability to investigate your own case. You are a fish in a barrel and all the guns are pointing at your head with no one to help. That is apparently the way “Not The Bee” thinks things ought to be, I guess.

I retweeted this nonsense from Not the Bee with incredulity and had at least one response in favor of this dumb tweet. “She’s a political activist in robes,” he said. I asked for examples from Judge Jackson’s body of work; he had none, which is not surprising since he also thought she had no judicial experience beyond her short stint on the Court of Appeals. But it’s what he’d heard, you see. And she’s a minority and she was a public defender so it must be assumed that she is a liberal political activist unfit for the bench.

Judge Jackson’s service as a public defender, even for a suspected terrorist, does not make her unfit to sit on the high bench. In fact, in some ways, it makes her more qualified to do so than her already seated colleagues. She’s fought in the dirty trenches where corporate lawyers and law professors and in-house counsel and law clerks fear to tread.

Is Judge Jackson otherwise suited for the job? I don’t know. I’ll let you know when I’m done sifting through hundreds of opinions to try to get a read on her. But if she isn’t, Judge Jackson representation of unsavory clients is not why.