The president, Joe Biden, will announce this Friday the nomination of Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson as a candidate for the Supreme Court of the United States, which will make her, if confirmed by the Senate,
the first black woman to serve in the highest court in the country
.
Ketanji Brown Jackson speaks before the Senate in April 2021. POOL / REUTERS
Jackson, 51, currently serves as a judge on the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia.
If confirmed, she will fill the seat vacated in the spring by Justice Stephen Breyer, making her the second youngest Supreme Court justice and the first since Thurgood Marshall with
significant experience as a defense attorney
.
Jacson was nominated and confirmed to serve on the federal appeals court in Washington just eight months ago.
Before that, she served eight years as a federal trial judge.
The judge was born in Washington, but
grew up in Miami
, where her mother was a school administrator and her father an attorney for the Miami-Dade school board.
“When people ask me why I decided to go into the legal profession,” he said in a 2017 speech, “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 Dad: He had all his law books stacked up and I had all my coloring books stacked up.”
Jackson was a national champion public speaker and student body president in high school and later graduated from Harvard University.
She was a law clerk for Breyer on the Supreme Court, who once described her as "
cool, brilliant, decent, with a mixture of common sense and thoughtfulness
."