Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson is Holding The Line

By Daniel Johnson

Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, the first Black woman appointed to the Supreme Court and an appointee of former President Joe Biden, has been consistently and sharply breaking with the conservative Supreme Court, utilizing the power afforded through her dissents to issue missives, aiming those arguments at not only the conservative Supreme Court justices, but at the country outside of the sacrosanct walls of the Court itself. 

As recently as March 31, Jackson, unwilling to give credence to the argument that conversion therapy is a first amendment right, stood alone to note in her dissent that allowing conversion therapy, a controversial form of religious violence visited on LGBTQ+ individuals, “threatens to impair States’ ability to regulate the provision of medical care in any respect.” Jackson continued, “It extends the Constitution into uncharted territory in an utterly irrational fashion. And it ultimately risks grave harm to Americans’ health and wellbeing.” 

Chiles v Salazar, the court case which the Supreme Court heard on the grounds of whether or not counseling is conduct, or speech, which in the latter case would be protected under the First Amendment and its Free Exercise Clause, ended up getting passed back down to a lower court for a review. However, regardless of this arrangement, it is the view of Scott Skinner-Thompson, a professor and dean’s scholar at the University of Colorado Law School, that “the decision is yet another setback for LGBTQ+ rights under the Roberts Court.  It represents another example of the Court wielding an expansive conception of First Amendment doctrine to limit laws seeking to protect LGBTQ+ individuals.”

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Thompson also notes that there are potentially more rulings coming that could affect LGBTQ+ individuals, such as a ruling which would determine whether or not state-funded religious schools can discriminate against LGBTQ+ individuals.

Conversion therapy, which has been described by the American Psychological Association as an attempt to change a person’s sexual orientation, gender identity, or other behaviors. The practice, they note, is rooted in the belief that being LBGTQ+ is a mental illness and has been widely discredited by experts within the field of psychology. In 2021, the APA’s Council of Representatives passed two resolutions regarding sexual orientation and gender identity.

Jackson’s public record reflects her unease with a court that, according to an April 9 report from The Washington Post, lays out that this court, led by long-time Voting Rights Act antagonist Chief Justice John Roberts, is the first Supreme Court since the 1950s to rule against women and minorities in a majority of cases involving those parties. 

Roberts, as Ari Berman noted in his 2015 book, “Give Us the Ballot: The Modern Struggle for Voting Rights in America,” has been waging a war against the Voting Rights Act essentially since he was a law clerk for former Chief Justice William Rehnquist,(Roberts later replaced Rehnquist upon the latter’s retirement) an ultra-conservative judge whose office, Berman noted, functioned as a precursor to the Federalist Society. 

According to Paul Smith, a well-known civil rights lawyer, “Rehnquist reinforced John’s preexisting philosophies. John (Roberts) was not a believer in the courts giving rights to minorities and the downtrodden. That was the basic Rehnquist philosophy.”

The conservatism of the current Supreme Court can be partially explained by Roberts’ philosophy and position as the Chief Justice, but it has also been shaped by the ability of Donald Trump to nominate and seat three Supreme Court justices, which NPR notes is more than any president not named Franklin Delano Roosevelt. It has also been shaped by the timing of Republican supermajorities in political office converging with vacancies on the Supreme Court. This, combined with the rise of the aforementioned Federalist Society, has resulted in a group of conservative judges who appear to be eager and willing to do the bidding of conservatism’s will.

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By contrast, Jackson’s position in the oral arguments of Trump v. Barbara, the case referred to in common parlance as the “birthright citizenship case” lays out her own judicial philosophy, a philosophy grounded in principled resistance to this conservative bent of the Court. Her direct line of questioning to John Sauer, the United States Solicitor General, in that case, went viral. Jackson previously warned in a 2025 dissent in a case that essentially ruled that nationwide injunctions should only be utilized in specific situations, that, “The Court’s decision to permit the Executive to violate the Constitution with respect to anyone who has not yet sued is an existential threat to the rule of law.” This phrasing is  a motif in Jackson’s dissents, particularly in dissents that have involved potentially far-reaching consequences. 

Indeed, as Daniel Harawa noted in a November 2025  column for SCOTUSBlog, Jackson’s dissents often go beyond language and content intended for her fellow justices, instead, her dissents appear to be crafted to travel to the denizens of the country. When asked, Jackson has not been afraid to stand on what she has written, as Harawa pointed out, Jackson pointedly told attendees at a luncheon for the Indianapolis Bar Association  that “I’m not afraid to use my voice…If I disagree, I’m going to say so.”

Lee Epstein, who authored the study cited by The Washington Post alongside his Washington University colleague Andrew D. Martin and Penn State’s Michael J. Nelson, indicated that the polarized nature of the Supreme Court epitomizes a troubling era in politics.

As Epstein told the outlet, “The polarization in American society seeps into the Senate. It seeps into the presidency. It is naturally going to seep into the courts. It would be surprising to see another John Paul Stevens. (Stevens is a former Supreme Court justice who died in 2019 who was known for being a mediator between his court’s left and right wings.) Partisan identity and ideology have become so intertwined.”

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As Jackson herself noted in an August 2025 dissent, “This is Calvinball jurisprudence with a twist,” Jackson wrote, alluding to a game played between the titular characters of the comic strip “Calvin and Hobbes.” “Calvinball has only one rule: There are no fixed rules. We seem to have two: that one, and this administration always wins.”

Jackson’s allusion here serves a dual purpose, one to illustrate the nonsensical (and partisan) logic that appears to govern this iteration of the Supreme Court and two, to serve as a mouthpiece for the American people at large who indicated via a Pew Research Center survey that half of the country believes that the court is biased in favor of conservative ideology.

Likewise, Nelson noted to the Washington Post that “The people see such a deep divide among the justices, it undermines the sense of procedural fairness and gives the sense that the cases are coming prejudged. That’s why we have seen the court’s public standing fall so much. People look at it as a much more partisan institution than they did 20 years ago.”

It is this critical service that Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson provides for the public. She is holding the line against the conservatism of this present Supreme Court in the interest of the citizens whom the conservatives of the Supreme Court are determined to leave behind. Jackson, to her credit, appears to believe that the purpose of the law is to serve the civil rights of those who would otherwise become targets of the law. In that respect, Jackson carries on her work in the lineage of figures like former Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall and she is a legal trailblazer in her own right, whose words and sharp dissents will stand the test of time.

Daniel Johnson is a freelance writer based in East Texas. His work can be found in Essence, Teen Vogue, Scalawag, Level, Black Youth Project, Black Enterprise, Texas Observer, and Prism.