Associate Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson is BU Law’s 2023 Commencement Speaker
The first Black woman confirmed for the Supreme Court of the United States will address the 150th class on May 21, 2023.
Collection of the Supreme Court of the United States
Associate Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson is BU Law’s 2023 Commencement Speaker
The first Black woman confirmed for the Supreme Court of the United States will address the 150th class on May 21, 2023.
Boston University School of Law is pleased to announce that Associate Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, Supreme Court of the United States, will deliver the 2023 Commencement address. The ceremony will mark the conclusion of the school’s 150th anniversary year and celebrate the 150th graduating class. Jackson is the first Black woman to sit on the highest court of the land, the first former public defender, and the first since Thurgood Marshall to have represented defendants in criminal court.
Dean Angela Onwuachi-Willig noted Jackson’s achievements in a letter urging the US Senate to confirm her: “With nearly ten years of service as a federal judge, experience clerking for Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer and two lower-court judges, and a record of leadership on the United States Sentencing Commission, she will make an incredible Supreme Court Justice.”
Jackson’s legal career began at Harvard Law School. She was a supervising editor of the Harvard Law Review and graduated in 1996. She served as a law clerk for Judge Patti B. Saris of the US District Court for the District of Massachusetts in 1996, Judge Bruce M. Selya of the US Court of Appeals for the First Circuit in 1997, and Justice Stephen G. Breyer of the Supreme Court of the United States during the 1999 term.
For the next decade, Jackson served as an assistant federal public defender in Washington, DC and worked in private practice and as an attorney at the US Sentencing Commission. In 2010, she was nominated by President Barack Obama, and confirmed by the Senate, to serve as a vice chair and commissioner on the US Sentencing Commission, a position that she held until 2014. While there, she earned a reputation for building consensus, resulting in mostly unanimous panel decisions.
In 2014, President Obama nominated Jackson to the US District Court for the District of Columbia where she served until 2021. During that time, she served on the Defender Services Committee of the Judicial Conference of the United States and the Supreme Court Fellows Commission.
In April 2021, President Joe Biden nominated Jackson to the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit; the Senate confirmed her nomination in June 2021.
In February 2022, President Biden nominated Jackson to serve as an associate justice of the Supreme Court of the United States. The Senate confirmed her on April 2, 2022, and she took her seat at the US Supreme Court on June 30, 2022.
Jackson was born in Washington, DC in 1970, with the African name “Ketanji Onyika,” which means “Lovely One.” Her parents, Ellery and Johnny Brown, were subjected to segregated primary schools. The Browns went to historically Black colleges and universities and became public school teachers. The family moved to Miami when Jackson was four, and Johnny went to University of Miami School of Law. Johnny Brown became chief attorney for the Miami-Dade County School Board. Ellery Brown became a school principal at New World School of the Arts in Miami, Florida.
In 2017, Jackson shared how her father inspired her, “When people ask why I decided to go into the legal profession, I often tell the story of how, when I was in preschool, I would sit at the dining room table doing my ‘homework’ with my father—he had all of his law books stacked up, and I had all of my coloring books stacked up—and when I think back to those times, there really is no question that my interest in the law began that early on.”
While at Miami Palmetto Senior High School, Jackson was a national oratory champion. In 1992, she received a Bachelor of Arts degree in government from Harvard. In the year before her studies at Harvard Law, she was a journalist and researcher at Time magazine. Jackson met her husband Patrick Jackson, a surgeon, while at Harvard College and today they have two daughters.
“It has taken 232 years and 115 prior appointments for a Black woman to be selected to serve on the Supreme Court of the United States,” Jackson said in remarks at a White House event the day after the Senate vote, “but we’ve made it! We’ve made it—all of us.”
