The “jurisprudence” of Ketanji Brown Jackson, Joe Biden’s nominee to the U.S. Supreme Court, was the subject of an extended essay by George Washington University law professor Jonathan Turley. It’s worth reading (link below). Brown Jackson has repeatedly denounced her colleagues — including fellow liberals Elena Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor — for being insufficiently committed to her agenda of outcomes-based “judging.” Her shrill dissents even elicited public pushback from Justice Amy Coney Barrett, who reminded Brown Jackson in an opinion that her vision leads to an “imperial judiciary.”

This should surprise no one. The more-or-less 60-year reign of judicial activism — from Earl Warren until Anthony Kennedy’s departure in 2018 — was precisely what the Left admired: a Court acting as a super-legislature, enacting policies with no appeal, to which Americans were told to offer incense in the name of the “rule of law.” Roe v. Wade exemplified this: seven unelected men effectively enacting a federal abortion statute — a grievous overreach finally overturned decades later.

Brown Jackson does not even attempt to mask her activism. Turley quotes her as admitting relief that, now ensconced in a lifetime sinecure, she is free “to tell people in my opinions how I feel about the issues. And that’s what I try to do.” That single sentence captures precisely what is wrong with her, with her “jurisprudence,” and those who supported her.

I keep putting “jurisprudence” in scare quotes because we ought to be scared. Ketanji Brown Jackson has no jurisprudence. She has opinions she intends to foist on America. She is a politician who has discovered the one office in America where you need not be elected to make laws and from which removal is nearly impossible. Accountability exists only to her own feelings: “to thine own [opinions] be true.”

There are two things wrong with Brown Jackson’s vision.

First, Brown Jackson needs to be told nobody cares about your “opinion” (except now, insofar, as you can use “raw judicial power” — to borrow Justice Byron White’s famous phrase — to impose it without appeal). Nobody voted for you. You are not a legislator. What people should care about is how you interpret the law you face, not invent. Or is your hubris so great that the objective interpretation of the meaning of the law and your “opinions” are one and the same? Is Ketanji a new sun queen: la loi, c’est moi?

Second, we should not forget that Ketanji Brown Jackson was Joe Biden’s DEI pick for the Supreme Court. He made clear his determining factor for a nominee was having a “black woman” on the bench. Well, with all undue respect, I am not interested in the “opinions” of a woman who was chosen because she was a woman who, during her confirmation hearing, dissembled about being able on the spot to say “what is a woman?” Those of us who saw that act concluded there were but two possibilities: a lack of sincerity or intelligence. Based on Brown Jackson’s now liberated feelings about sharing her “opinions,” at least we know it was the former.

Turley has done us a service in exposing Brown Jackson’s judicial philosophy — or lack thereof. Clarence Darrow once defined a judge as a lawyer who knew a president. In that sense, Brown Jackson is like the president who appointed her: intellectually shallow, steeped in narcissistic confidence, and convinced that opinion equals truth. That is not jurisprudence; that is the enthronement of self in place of law and, ultimately, truth.

At least Brown Jackson is not a plagiarist.

[A link to the Turley essay is here.]