Ketanji Brown Jackson was sworn in at the Supreme Court and smashed a glass ceiling as the first black woman on the country’s highest court.
The 51-year-old Jackson is the court’s 116th judge and she took the place of the judge she once worked for on Thursday. Judge Stephen Breyer’s retirement took effect yesterday afternoon.
Moments later, with her family, Jackson recited the two oaths required of Supreme Court justices, one by Breyer and the other by Chief Justice John Roberts.
Jackson, a federal judge since 2013, is the first black woman to serve as a judge. She joins three women, Judges Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan and Amy Coney Barrett – the first time four women will serve together in court with nine members.
Biden nominated Jackson in February, a month after Breyer, 83, announced he would retire at the end of the court term, assuming his successor was confirmed. Breyer’s earlier-than-usual announcement and the condition he attached was an acknowledgment of the Democrats’ slim grip on the Senate in an era of hyperpartiality, especially around federal judicial posts.
The Senate confirmed Jackson’s nomination in early April, with a 53-47 mostly party-line vote that includes support from three Republicans.
She has since been in a kind of judicial limbo, remains a judge in the federal appeals court in Washington, DC, but has not heard any cases. Biden elevated her to that court of the district court to which she was appointed by President Barack Obama.
Jackson will be able to start work immediately, but the court will only have completed most of his work by the fall, apart from occasional emergency appeals. This will give her time to settle and familiarize herself with the roughly two dozen cases the court has already agreed to hear in October, as well as hundreds of appeals that will pile up over the summer.
The court issued final opinions earlier Thursday after an important and gruesome term that overturned Roe v. Wade’s guarantee of the right to an abortion. One of Thursday’s decisions limited how the Environmental Protection Agency could use the country’s main law against air pollution to reduce carbon dioxide emissions from power plants to fuel the fight against climate change.