What Can Memoirs by Supreme Court Justices Teach Us?
“Fools” is one of Neil Simon’s lesser plays. It involves a schoolmaster who, in some imaginary past, is sent to a Ukrainian village whose residents are burdened with a curse of stupidity. The comedy is broad. But in the nineteen-eighties a member of the Miami Palmetto Senior High School speech-and-debate team performed an extract, complete with an Eastern European accent, to great effect. The South Florida high-school forensics circuit took note, and other students began using the same scene, but without the same comic skill or success. “It seems to me that you are not doing Neil Simon’s ‘Fools,’ ” a judge told one disappointed competitor. “You are doing Ketanji Brown doing Neil Simon’s ‘Fools.’ ”
Learning how to be, or become, Ketanji Brown Jackson was no mean feat, even at a forensics tournament. In her new memoir, “Lovely One” (Random House), Jackson, who joined the Supreme Court in 2022, writes that she was “fiercely” competitive. She skipped her high-school commencement to compete in the National Catholic Forensic League championships. “You will have other graduations,” her father said—the plural noun being a reflection of the family’s expectations. She won for Original Oratory, with a speech about valuing one’s time.
Along with the trophies came a realization that she was, one way or another, always on display. “I was learning to walk into rooms where hardly anyone else looked like me with my head held high,” Jackson writes, and, as she saw it, she was not in it only for her own sake. A family friend known as Ms. Kitty, who had grown up in segregated Birmingham and come along as a chaperon to a speech tournament at Ole Miss, became “more emotional than I had ever seen her” when Jackson took first place. “This is amazing. You are amazing,” Ms. Kitty told her, in tears. “I thought you were the best, and I was hoping that the judges would see that, too. And, by gosh, they did!”
Jackson is the first Black woman—and only the third Black person, and the sixth woman—to sit on the Court, and in some ways her memoir could not be better timed. The coming election is sharpening the focus on the Court: the Justices may hear challenges to the results, and the next President may have vacancies to fill. Americans want to know Jackson better; around the time she was appointed to the Court, she realized that genealogists were scouring the records of county clerks in rural Georgia for details about her family. She decided to write her own story.
And yet the book presents a puzzle for the reader. It can’t really be called a Supreme Court memoir. Although Jackson talks about the behind-the-scenes scrambling during her confirmation process, she doesn’t share anything significant about her time on the Court itself. Given concerns about confidentiality and the need to get along with her colleagues-for-life, she can’t exactly write a tell-all. There are no scenes of the Court’s fight over Trump and immunity, despite Jackson’s writing a dissent calling the majority opinion a “five-alarm fire” for democracy. The word “abortion” appears only once.
Some of her reserve is, no doubt, a lingering effect of her confirmation process. Prospective Justices’ Senate hearings have become partisan spectator sports. They are exercises in entrapment punctuated by both petty cruelty and rapturous cheerleading—and, in Jackson’s case, racist insinuation and Trumpist posturing. Republican senators intimated that she had, for example, intended to support terrorists when, as an assistant federal public defender, she represented Guantánamo detainees. She doesn’t discuss those particular clients in her memoir. To explain why indigent defendants have a right to a lawyer, she turns to Gideon v. Wainwright, which was decided in 1963, safely in the past. (She uses classic cases this way more than once.) Such elisions may be understandable, but the hearings are over. One wishes, for Jackson’s sake as well as the reader’s, that she could finally let her guard down. If the memoir isn’t meant to reveal what’s happening on the Court at a juncture when its legitimacy is being questioned, then what manner of book is this—a coming-of-age story, a D.C. career guide, a congressional thriller, or something else?
Jackson is not alone among Justices in telling her life story. There is a long tradition of memoirs, notably William O. Douglas’s “Go East, Young Man,” which is famously colorful and perhaps factually dubious, and his “The Court Years”; “The Memoirs of Earl Warren,” published posthumously; Sandra Day O’Connor’s “Lazy B,” written with her brother, about growing up on a ranch in what they call “no country for sissies”; and John Paul Stevens’s “The Making of a Justice: Reflections on My First 94 Years,” whose subtitle bespeaks his optimism. There are also collections of speeches and interviews with a personal angle (“Scalia Speaks,” “Felix Frankfurter Reminisces”).
Those volumes vary in their frankness, but they all came out after or near the ends of their authors’ careers, when there was less to risk or gain. “Lovely One” belongs to a modern mini-genre of personal memoirs written much earlier, by sitting Justices. Clarence Thomas pioneered the form, with “My Grandfather’s Son,” which appeared in 2007, sixteen years into his tenure—though the book ends with his swearing-in—followed by Sonia Sotomayor, with “My Beloved World,” in 2013, four years into hers. The pace has picked up. Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett have books in the works, too. It is almost as if, along with the judicial robes and clerks, newly confirmed Justices are issued book contracts.
The advances alone may be the point. Thomas got a million and a half dollars. Sotomayor has built a franchise—with a younger-readers version of her memoir, an audiobook read by Rita Moreno, and three picture books—that has earned her close to four million dollars. Barrett’s deal, worth a reported two million, was the subject of an open letter of protest, though only after she voted to overturn Roe. (Barrett’s book is said to be about keeping personal feelings out of judging.)
Jackson’s contract is not public, but she reported close to nine hundred thousand dollars in book income on her financial-disclosure forms for last year. (She collaborated on “Lovely One” with Rosemarie Robotham, a former editor at Essence.) The salary for an Associate Justice is about three hundred thousand dollars; there are caps on how much the Justices are allowed to earn for outside work, but book earnings are exempt.
The incentives might explain the slapdash quality of Neil Gorsuch’s 2019 book, “A Republic, if You Can Keep It,” which is a selection of his speeches, opinions, and public writings, padded with enough personal material to get it filed in a library’s autobiography section. It was, nonetheless, a best-seller. Gorsuch, like some other Justices—notably Stephen Breyer, whose books include “Reading the Constitution” (published in March)—has also written about policy. Gorsuch’s “Over Ruled,” which came out in August (and was co-written by Janie Nitze, one of his former clerks), is about his distaste for federal regulations—marketing material for fans of his ideological brand.
Thomas’s book is an exemplar of the genre confusion of the Supreme Court memoir: it is a revenge tragedy masquerading as a bildungsroman. Although it purports to be a tribute to his tough grandfather, who helped raise him, it is infused with anger over his confirmation hearings, at which Anita Hill, a law professor who once worked for him, accused him of sexual harassment. Thomas portrays himself as a man beset by “enemies” (i.e., liberals), and dismisses Hill as their instrument. He calls a chapter on the hearings “Invitation to a Lynching.” (One wonders what Kavanaugh, who at his hearing parried a sexual-assault accusation dating to his high-school years, will call his chapter. Both Justices strongly denied the allegations.) A pivotal scene takes place with Thomas in a bathtub. The Senate is voting on his nomination, but he is too bitter about the hearings to come out and listen to the roll call. His wife, Virginia, comes in to say he’s been confirmed: “Whoop-dee damn-doo,” he replies, sinking back into “the comforting water.”
One surprise, on reading “My Grandfather’s Son” now, is how much it resembles J. D. Vance’s “Hillbilly Elegy,” another ambiguous memoir in which the author is rescued by a tough grandparent. (Also unexpected is the role, until he quit, in his thirties, of Thomas’s heavy drinking; with some editing, and perhaps more honesty, the book could be a recovery memoir.) If one question about early-career Supreme Court memoirs is whether they can reveal a Justice’s future trajectory, then Thomas partially delivers. He is resentful of women, especially those whom he regards as privileged, a harbinger of his opposition to reproductive rights. He is, by his own account, constantly short of money as a young lawyer, leading him to rely on colleagues, just as he would later turn to friends like the billionaire Harlan Crow. Then again, he’s also nostalgic about his youthful affinity for Malcolm X. Treating a memoir as an encrypted judicial road map requires the extra key of hindsight. The most salient predictor of Thomas’s votes on the Court may simply be that he was elevated by a Republican President, George H. W. Bush. But you don’t need a memoir to know that.
Thomas, recalling the birth of his son, Jamal Adeen, in 1973, writes archly, if not ruefully, that “it had become fashionable for black parents to give their children African or Arabic names.” Jackson, born in 1970, loves her name, Ketanji Onyika, which her family was told means “lovely one” in a West African dialect, and presents it as an example of how her parents “very intentionally instilled pride in our heritage, and faith in the future, in me.”
Jackson’s father, Johnny, a lawyer for the Miami-Dade school system, and her mother, Ellery, a teacher who became a high-school principal, extended that intentionality to her education. “Lovely One” is, in some ways, most of all a parenting book. Jackson writes that everything in her bedroom was labelled with alphabet and word cards, because her mother wanted her reading by the time she was two years old. There were also Wildlife Treasury cards, piano lessons, limits on television viewing, and a question for her if she ever hesitated: “Can this be done, Ketanji?” her mother would say. “Have you seen other people do it?” If the answer was yes, then she would be told, “Well, if it is possible for a person to do this thing, then you can do it, too.”
In Jackson’s telling, her family did not so much shield her from racism as give her a sense of her own strength. “Oh, honey, those people have nothing to do with your life,” her grandmother told her after she was followed by wary salespeople in a store. “Guard your spirit, Ketanji,” her mother said. Heeding their “beloved voices,” Jackson writes, “I embraced all the places in my life where I could dwell in the light.” She was the president of her majority-white high-school class, and, as she did everywhere, built enduring friendships. When she and three classmates got into Harvard early, the Palmetto principal announced that fact over the P.A. system, and other students cheered. “We were all so happy for you,” she recalls a classmate telling her. “Nobody was jealous or resentful, and absolutely nobody was surprised by your achievement—because you are Ketanji!”
What keeps the book from veering into “Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother” territory is the arrival of Jackson’s first child, her daughter Talia. Jackson had, as those around her expected, flourished at Harvard. (I was there at the same time.) During her sophomore year, she met Patrick Jackson—he is white, and their love story is a large part of the book—and went to Harvard Law as he attended Columbia’s medical school. She became pregnant while holding down a Supreme Court clerkship. But the Big Law position she took next was not amenable to mothers of young children. Patrick, though unstintingly supportive, had a demanding job, too. Jackson left her firm and embarked on what she calls “my odyssey as a professional vagabond.”
Jackson being Jackson, it was pretty high-level vagabondage—a federal public defender’s office, a boutique firm, the U.S. Sentencing Commission. She is transparent about the fact that a lot of paid caregivers were involved, especially once a second child, Leila, arrived.
But Talia, whose room, like Jackson’s, is festooned with Wildlife Treasury cards, had meltdowns in preschool, then seizures, and was eventually diagnosed as having autism. Being Talia’s mother, Jackson writes, meant changing her idea of what it meant to be a good parent. “The only script I had when it came to personal achievement was: No excuses; don’t allow doubts to overtake you,” she writes. Jackson remembers, with regret, exhorting Talia to finish her math homework, just as her mother once had:
