Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson returned to GDS this week as the speaker for the annual Benjamin Cooper Memorial Lecture. The speaker series was established in memory of Cooper, a GDS student who was killed in a car crash in 1997.
As is custom for the Cooper lecture series, Jackson gave two lectures on Wednesday: a morning assembly for high school students and faculty, and an evening event for community members. In both lectures, she answered pre-written questions from attendees that Head of School Russell Shaw read aloud. Shaw also asked his own questions.
During her lectures on Nov. 19, Jackson talked about her Supreme Court confirmation process, recent cases on the Court and her 2024 memoir Lovely One.
“I am thrilled to be back,” Jackson said during the high school lecture. “It feels like coming home.” Jackson served on the GDS Board of Trustees for three years, until her confirmation as the first Black woman Supreme Court justice. One of her two daughters, Leila Jackson, graduated from the school in 2022.
Jackson, through the Supreme Court Public Information Officer, declined an interview for this article.
During the evening lecture, Shaw asked Jackson about her 2022 Senate Judiciary Committee confirmation hearing. Texas Senator Ted Cruz questioned Jackson about her service on the GDS Board of Trustees. “If you look at the Georgetown Day School’s curriculum, it is filled and overflowing with critical race theory,” Cruz said during the hearing. Tennessee Senator Marsha Blackburn also questioned Jackson about her service on the Board, but Jackson and Shaw did not mention Blackburn’s remarks on Wednesday.
Jackson recalled dropping off her daughter at GDS on senior prank day a few months after the confirmation hearings and seeing a banner the seniors had hung. “There was a banner that said, ‘Welcome to Ted Cruz’s worst nightmare,’” Jackson said. Jackson, Shaw and much of the audience then laughed. The audience followed laughter with cheers.
Jackson said that when she heard Cruz’s comments she still felt “very proud of the school and its values.” Jackson said she told Shaw in 2022 she was sorry that GDS came up during the hearing.
During the high school lecture, Jackson said that she met with 98 senators for the confirmation process. “The senators were very nice in person,” Jackson said. She said she felt comfortable in those meetings with the senators, and she generally discussed family with them and spoke little about law.
When Jackson compared the demeanor of the Republican senators in the confirmation hearing to their kinder embrace in her meetings with them, she said she had a realization: “I thought in my head, this is a performance. I understood that they had a job to do, and I had a job to do.”
During the high school lecture, Jackson discussed her Nov. 7 decision that paused a lower court’s order for the Donald Trump administration to fully fund the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) for the month of November. “It’s very standard to issue an administrative stay in scenarios like this,” Jackson said.
Jackson approved the administration’s request for an administrative stay, but also—in contrast to how justices usually approach administrative stays—included a written explanation of why she was approving the request and set the stay to expire 48 hours after the U.S. Appeals Court for the 1st Circuit made its decision on SNAP funding. Jackson is the justice assigned to 1st Circuit emergency applications.
When the government reopened on Nov. 12, federal funding for SNAP benefits resumed and the case lost its practical significance. If Jackson had not granted the stay, the decision on SNAP funding could have been sent to the full Supreme Court and its conservative majority.
Nov. 19 was Justice Jackson’s second time speaking at a Benjamin Cooper lecture series. She spoke virtually alongside three other speakers, journalist Nina Totenberg, U.S. Circuit Judge Nina Pillard and Congressman Jamie Raskin ’79, in Nov. 2020 in honor of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Justice Ginsburg was originally slated to give that year’s lecture, but she died in Sept. 2020.
Jackson is the third Supreme Court justice to have served on the GDS Board. Before her, Justices Thurgood Marshall and Ginsburg also sat on the Board. Justice Sonia Sotomayor, who did not serve on the Board, spoke at the 19th Benjamin Cooper Memorial Lecture in 2016.
Jackson opened the evening with a section of her memoir, Lovely One, that describes her swearing-in ceremony. Jackson said that when she took her Supreme Court oath, she placed her palm on a stack of two Bibles. One was passed through generations in the Jackson family, and the other was originally owned by former Supreme Court Justice John Marshall Harlan.
Since 1906, Supreme Court justices have signed the Harlan Bible after being sworn in. When the Bible was presented to Jackson to sign, she said she felt its significance in history. Harlan was the only justice to dissent in Plessy v. Ferguson, the case that established the “separate but equal” doctrine on segregation. Harlan argued that the Constitution is color-blind.
“Her voice is absolutely necessary to the law and our public discourse,” Kenyan McDuffie, an At-Large D.C. Councilmember, GDS parent and former Board member, said. McDuffie served with Jackson on the Board and is reportedly considering a run for D.C. mayor.
Shaw asked Jackson how she stays motivated as a justice. “Too many people have worked too hard for me to quit,” Jackson said. Jackson recognized Constance Baker Motley, the first Black woman to argue a case before the Supreme Court, whom she shares a birthday with. “We’ve made it 232 years without a Black woman,” she said.
Former Board member Jenny Abramson ’95 said Jackson is able to clearly and powerfully communicate her opinion without the need to say more than is needed. “[On the Board], she didn’t take up all the airtime, but instead spoke when she had something unique to add to the conversation,” Abramson said.
“Tonight, not just hearing what Jackson said, but watching the reactions of people in the audience gave me hope for the first time in a really long time,” Tara Royster ’91 said.