One of the allegedly leading candidates for President Biden’s Supreme Court nomination is Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson, who was recently elevated to the D.C. Court of Appeals after eight years as a district court judge. Like California Supreme Court Justice Leondra Kruger, whose curriculum vitae was summarized in the post below this one, Judge Jackson has a gold-plated résumé: an upper middle class alumna of Harvard University and Law School, three successively more elevated judicial clerkships, the last with Justice Breyer himself, BigLaw experience. She is also a member of the Harvard Board of Overseers (a body that advises the governing Board of Trustees), which leads to this footnote.
Harvard’s discrimination against applicants of Asian descent is the subject of a case that will soon be heard by the Supreme Court. The University doesn’t seriously deny that it discriminates. Its defense is that discrimination against highly qualified Asian-Americans is essential to achieving “diversity” in the student body.
One can imagine the uproar if a President nominated someone for the Supreme Court who was an “overseer” (BTW, why hasn’t Harvard ditched that white supremacist title, the way that Yale got rid of “master” for heads of residential colleges (but not for post-baccalaureate degrees)?) of an institution that discriminated against blacks, women, American Indians, homosexuals or, worst of all, biology deniers.
We all know why Judge Jackson’s association with a racially discriminatory institution has barely been noticed: On the progressive scale of values, Asians are a group, like Jews, observant Christians and white males, against whom discrimination is no sin. Still, the U.S. Senate has a non-progressive majority, so the judge may be asked what she thinks about Harvard's treating Asians today the way it treated Jews 60 years ago.
Curiously, a parallel issue came up when she was nominated for the Court of Appeals. A Republican Senator mischievously asked her about her service on the advisory board of a Christian private school whose “Statement of Belief” proclaimed “the sanctity of all human life from conception to natural death” and that marriage is possible only between individuals of opposite sexes. Her response was to deny that she had been aware of the school’s positions. (Expressing agreement with them would, of course, have more than decimated her Democratic support.) One may anticipate a similar declaration of ignorance concerning Harvard admissions.
As a footnote to the footnote, Judge Jackson is reportedly the favorite candidate of the progressive inner circle, just as Justice Kruger is of liberal lawyers. No doubt working in Jackson’s favor are her turgid writing style and the notable cases in which her district court decisions were reversed by the Court of Appeals, winning little favor even from “liberal” judges.
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