NYT: Ketanji Brown Jackson - only sane SCOTUS justice - should STFU

Stunningly bad take from the New York Times’ Adam Liptak

Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson is the only member of today’s Supreme Court consistently speaking with moral clarity - though that’s not how the New York Times frames it*.

In a Supreme Court term defined by conservative capitulation to Donald Trump, Jackson authored over 20 dissents and concurrences, many of them solo, each one a pointed indictment of a court tilting dangerously toward executive overreach. She accused the majority of creating a “zone of lawlessness” and warned that their decisions were “an existential threat to the rule of law.”

But instead of reckoning with the substance of her critique, the NYT’s Adam Liptak, a Social Security-aged white guy, Yale Law grad and avatar of institutional fart sniffing, frames Jackson as some kind of noisy outsider—too quick to dissent, too willing to speak plainly, not sufficiently collegial for the marble halls. When Justice Amy Coney Barrett (fresh off being called a “D.E.I. hire” by the MAGA-sphere) slapped down Jackson’s dissent with a sniffy “we will not dwell,” Liptak treats it as a justified mic drop, rather than performative asskissing directed squarely at Donald Trump.

Barrett’s response, sanctimoniously asserting that Jackson’s argument “is at odds with more than two centuries’ worth of precedent,” reads like a judicial Karen trying to curry favor with the MAGA base by shushing the one justice who won’t play along. Liptak embraces that narrative, casting Jackson’s forceful, principled objections as somehow excessive or disruptive. Never mind that she’s the only one acting like the rule of law still matters.

Liptak leans hard on a parade of academic and judicial voices to echo a single, patronizing theme: that Justice Jackson is too loud, too fast, and too early in her tenure to speak with such authority. Former justices are quoted, marveling at how long it took them to find their footing: Breyer “frightened to death” for three years; Brandeis allegedly needing five to “understand the jurisprudential problems of the court”. As if Jackson, by contrast, should be ashamed for stepping confidently into her role? The implication isn’t subtle: she should sit quietly, watch the senior justices work, and wait her turn.

Academics and think tank-types weigh in to echo the same refrain with a scholarly veneer. One says she’s “breaking the fourth wall,” another that she’s “less concerned with collegiality.” Her dissents are categorized not as courageous or prescient, but as “startling,” “untethered,” or, in Barrett’s words, not “dwell”-worthy. The message is clear: Jackson’s audacity to dissent - on her own, with clarity, and often with fire - isn’t judicial independence, it’s impropriety. When a Black woman writes like the future depends on it, this court - and the New York Times - responds by treating her like she doesn’t know her place.

In short: the only justice treating this moment like the constitutional crisis it is gets cast as the problem. Everyone else, including the Times, is busy keeping up appearances while the (White) house burns.