A justice’s life

Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson is generally regarded as one of the liberals on the United States Supreme Court, but the themes undergirding her life story, as told in her new memoir, are deeply conservative. In Lovely One (Random House, 432 pp.), Jackson writes of her deep appreciation for faith, family, and hard work.

Recalling her childhood, she writes of “rousing Pentecostal services at Bethel Apostolic Church” with her mother and grandmother. She adores her Aunt Carolynn, “an extraordinary soul who lived her Christian faith” as a global missionary. She tells us, “Grandma Euzera frequently said that God had whispered to her that I was ‘a blessed child.’”

She spends many pages on her family, including an “extended clan of aunts, uncles, and cousins” who lived nearby in Miami; her grandmothers; and her in-laws from Boston. She writes of her resilient marriage of almost 40 years with her college sweetheart, a compassionate if driven surgeon. Together they raised two girls—one with autism—as a tight-knit and joy-filled family.

She tells about the difficulty of balancing work and motherhood. “Going back into the office as a new mother, and returning to the cadence and pressures of Big Law, was the stuff of nightmares,” she says. “I missed my baby. Every time I thought of her, my heart would swell with longing and regret.”

That challenge stemmed in large part from her deep-seated commitment to working hard with excellence. Hard work was her path to get ahead in life, whether in her youthful experiences in drama and forensics or on the grinding treadmills of judicial clerkships and law firm life.

Though much of her story will resonate with conservative readers, Jackson remains a firm progressive, with racial identity as the other driving reality of her life.

Jackson’s memoir is not written for a legal audience. Indeed, the law itself figures almost nowhere in the book. Rather, it is an honest and inspiring tale explaining her rise to the top of her chosen profession. During her own clerkship for Justice Stephen Breyer, she learned that “being a ‘decider’ at the Supreme Court level ideally required extra­ordinary stamina, deep reserves of character, and the courage of one’s convictions.” Her memoir leaves no doubt she possesses those traits—conservatives can only hope that the values that shaped her own success will also shape her approach to issues like religious liberty.