Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson continues to speak out when she believes her colleagues are misusing their power. The latest example came Monday, when the Biden appointee dissented from a Supreme Court ruling in favor of law enforcement in a Fourth Amendment case.
In District of Columbia v. R.W., the high court majority disagreed with a ruling from D.C.’s appeals court that said a police officer violated the amendment by stopping a person without reasonable suspicion. In an unsigned per curiam opinion, the justices said the D.C. court failed to properly consider the “totality of the circumstances.” The justices summarily reversed the lower court.
Jackson, however, saw the maneuver by her colleagues as heavy-handed.
In her dissent, she wrote that if the court’s intervention “reflects disapproval” of the D.C. court’s “assessment of which particular facts to weigh and to what extent, I cannot fathom why that kind of factbound determination warranted correction by this Court.” She deemed the move “not a worthy accomplishment for the unusual step of summary reversal.”
A notation at the end of the majority’s opinion said that Justice Sonia Sotomayor would have denied D.C.’s petition for high court review, but she didn’t join Jackson’s dissent or write her own to elaborate.
Jackson’s dissent follows a lecture she gave last week at Yale Law School in which she criticized what she saw as her colleagues’ disrespect of lower courts’ work.
Monday’s ruling appeared among several high court actions on a 25-page order list, a routine document containing the latest action on pending appeals. The list is mostly unexplained denials of petitions for review, but sometimes it contains opinions and justices writing separately to explain themselves.
In another case on the list, Sotomayor, Jackson and the court’s third Democratic-appointed justice, Elena Kagan, all noted their dissent from the majority’s unexplained summary reversal in favor of law enforcement in a qualified immunity case.
It takes four justices to grant review of a petition. That simple math underscores the lack of power wielded by the three Democratic appointees, especially on the most contentious issues.
On that note, one of the new cases the court took up on Monday involves its latest foray into religion in public life, which the religious side has been winning at the court. The new case is an appeal from Catholic preschools in Colorado that want public funding while still admitting, as they wrote in their petition, “only families who support Catholic beliefs, including on sex and gender.” The case will be heard in the next court term that starts in October.
The post Justice Jackson keeps calling out what she sees as needless Supreme Court interventions appeared first on MS NOW.
