WASHINGTON (CN) — Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson will spend this week trying to convince senators on the Judiciary Committee that she should be the next justice on the country’s highest court. To do this they’ll want to know what kind of justice she would be.
“Someone as accomplished as you are, who spent years engaging and thinking about our Constitution and laws, has surely formed a judicial philosophy,” Texas Republican Senator John Cornyn said during the first day of Jackson’s confirmation hearings.
A judge's judicial philosophy is the set of ideas and beliefs that shape his or her rulings. Basically, senators are asking Jackson how she’ll rule on the bench.
“It ends up really coming down to how they view a judge's role in our constitutional system,” Caroline Fredrickson, a distinguished visitor from practice at Georgetown Law and senior fellow at the Brennan Center for Justice, said in a phone call.
Fredrickson continued, “What she's being asked is, 'How do you approach constitutional interpretation? How do you approach statutory interpretation? What are your thoughts on executive power?'”
During her confirmation to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit last year, Jackson said in a written response that she does not have a judicial philosophy "per se."
"Specifically, in every case that I have handled as a district judge, I have considered only the parties’ arguments, the relevant facts, and the law as I understand it, including the text of any applicable statutes and the binding precedents of the
Supreme Court and the D.C. Circuit. And I have consistently applied the same level of analytical rigor to my evaluation of the parties’ arguments, no matter who or what is involved in the legal action," she wrote.
In her opening statement Monday, Jackson described her approach in the same vein.
“I have been a judge for nearly a decade now, and I take that responsibility and my duty to be independent very seriously,” Jackson said. “I decide cases from a neutral posture. I evaluate the facts, and I interpret and apply the law to the facts of the case before me, without fear or favor, consistent with my judicial oath.”
Jackson says that as a judge — or possibly soon to be justice — her job is limited. She applies the law; she doesn’t make the law.
“She embraced Justice Breyer — for whom she clerked, and interestingly, she's replacing — and as a result, she has a judicial philosophy that is oriented towards a constitutional theory that embraces the rights of the Constitution, that protects citizens through those rights, but that ultimately is limited by the judge's ability only to apply the law not to make the law,” Frederick Lawrence, a distinguished lecturer at Georgetown Law, said in a phone call.
Jackson is also trying to make clear that she doesn’t follow a specific ideology but rather reads the text of the law and does her best to understand what it means.
“What she's trying to say is she doesn't fall into a camp and most judges don't really,” Fredrickson said. “They all use the text and then some of them look at other tools to try and understand what are often very confusing statutes or vague provisions of the Constitution. So, I think what she's indicating is that she's a faithful reader of the text, but also does her best to try and really understand what the text means.”
Noting her sometimes lengthy opinions, Jackson said she values transparency and the need for judges to explain their rulings.
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