Black Women Law Professors ‘Ecstatic’ Over Jackson’s Nomination
When the first person of color on the nation’s highest court retired three decades ago, the nation’s first female justice paid tribute to the invaluable experience he brought to what had been an exclusively white male institution.
“Although all of us come to the court with our own personal histories and experiences, Justice [Thurgood] Marshall brought a special perspective,” Justice Sandra Day O’Connor wrote in 1992 in the Stanford Law Review.
“At oral arguments and conference meetings, in opinions and dissents, Justice Marshall imparted not only his legal acumen but also his life experiences, constantly pushing and prodding us to respond not only to the persuasiveness of legal argument but also to the power of moral truth.”
Angela Onwuachi-Willig, the dean of Boston University’s law school, lifts up O’Connor’s insight in a recent letter in support of another legal pioneer: Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson, recently nominated to succeed retiring Justice Stephen Breyer.
If confirmed, Jackson is not expected to dramatically change the ideological composition of the court, which is now dominated by six conservatives. But she would make an immediate and monumental mark as the court’s first Black female justice and its first …
This op-ed was originally published in Drilled News on May 26, 2021. This is an excerpt.
Last week, the U.S. Supreme Court weighed in on an important case about whether major oil and gas companies should be held accountable for engaging in a systematic marketing campaign to deceive the public about the catastrophic threat that fossil fuel products pose to the planet.
The Court didn’t consider the merits of the case but rather answered an obscure procedural question in a way that permits the defendants to continue to delay litigation in state court, and thereby also serves to deny the public essential information about the fossil fuel industry’s attempt to spread disinformation about its products’ role in fueling the climate crisis.
In the case, Baltimore alleges that the companies used deceptive marketing tactics to hide the danger of fossil fuel products in order to …
- 1 (current)
