Ketanji Brown Jackson is a justice seeking to establish her legacy. By some lights, her mere presence as the first black women on the Supreme Court is already a legacy-cementing fact. To her credit, she understands that status alone is not enough, and thus she has been enormously active as a questioner and opinion writer during her three-year tenure on the court. But it is doubtful that her prolific and eccentric performance at the close of the 2024 term has helped her legacy. 

First, a brief survey of her role this term. According to statistics from SCOTUSblog and Empirical SCOTUS, Jackson was in the majority less than any justice in the 2024 term (72%). That percentage drops to 51% in nonunanimous cases and 45% in “closely divided cases,” both the lowest of any justice. Those figures place her on the periphery of the current court.  

During oral arguments, however, she dwarfs her colleagues in the number of words spoken and the number of minutes used. She writes the shortest opinions, averaging 3,400 words. But that might be attributable in part to the fact that as the most junior justice, she is assigned majority opinions in the least controversial cases. Still, she creates additional opportunities to put her thoughts into writing. She wrote more dissents than any member of the court (10), and when concurrences are factored in, she wrote 24 total opinions this term, trailing only Justice Clarence Thomas (29). 

Probably Jackson’s most significant majority opinion this term was Ames v. Ohio Dept. of Youth Services, where a unanimous court overturned lower court rulings that forced “majority group” members to satisfy a heightened evidentiary standard to prove claims of workplace discrimination. Jackson dispatched Ohio’s contrary arguments in a brisk nine pages.   

It is, however, Jackson’s dissents that have garnered the most critical attention. At the risk of missing important material, let us confine ourselves........

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