Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson lands in every Supreme Court majority opinion so far
Kaelan Deese
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Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, the newest addition to the 6-3 conservative majority Supreme Court, has maintained a track record of landing in the majority of every decision so far this term.
Appointed by President Joe Biden as the first black woman on the high court, Jackson wrote her second decision Wednesday since she succeeded Justice Stephen Breyer on the nine-member bench last year. The Supreme Court has issued 13 full opinions as of April 19, and Jackson is the only one who has remained in the majority for all 13 written rulings.
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However, the newest justice has issued dissents in high court decisions where the majority declined to take up a case for consideration, such as her signaling she would have taken up a case surrounding a death row inmate in Ohio back in November.
“Justice Jackson hasn’t dissented in a case on the merits but she has several times and early in the term from Court orders and cert decisions,” Adam Feldman, founder of the widely cited blog EmpiricalSCOTUS, said. “This indicates (to me) that she isn’t against dissenting but rather that the content of the decisions so far has been significant in reaching that result.”
Jackson’s second written opinion, published on Wednesday, was joined by the full court to overturn a lower court’s decision against the parent company of the Minneapolis-based Mall of America. The decision means the nation’s largest shopping complex can challenge a lease it made decades ago with Sears, which was later sold to a new owner during the department chain’s bankruptcy.
The justice was also in the majority in two other decisions Wednesday written by Justice Brett Kavanaugh, an appointee of former President Donald Trump and one of the six total Republican-appointed justices.
One of Kavanaugh’s opinions rejected a Turkish bank’s primary arguments for dismissing a lawsuit accusing it of helping Iran evade sanctions from the United States, sending the matter back to its original jurisdiction for additional review. A second opinion he authored paved the way for a Texas death row inmate, Rodney Reed, to seek post-conviction DNA evidence to try and prove his innocence.
Jackson’s streak of landing in the majority also coincides with a trend this term for more of the court’s three liberal justices winding up in the majority, as well as a streak of unanimous decisions, albeit the cases decided so far have had less to do with “civil liberties,” a point Feldman said might explain the noticeable pattern.
“I’m guessing we see lengthier dissents from the liberal justices later in the term and in cases that have more to do with civil liberties. This has historically been the general area where the justices divide ideologically,” Feldman said.
Justices who are new to the court typically settle into their new positions and can tend to develop more “distinct decision patterns” after one or more years as a justice, according to an April 10 report from Feldman.
Last year, the Supreme Court saw several 6-3 decisions on ideological lines, including 13 decisions in which the court’s three liberal members were united in dissent. The court made extraordinary decisions last summer, including overturning Roe v. Wade and establishing a precedent that gun laws must fit into the nation’s historical tradition of firearm regulation.
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Feldman predicts once the Supreme Court wades into more complex decisions, like the fate of affirmative action or a Colorado designer’s bid to shield herself from state-level punishment for refusing to create websites for same-sex marriages, the number of 6-3 decisions this term will begin to rise.
“The court still has three-quarters of its decisions to release for the term, so there is plenty of time for disagreement,” Feldman added.