Justice Jackson Is The Supreme Court’s Mean Girl

To negotiate in good faith or go scorched earth?

That appears to be the key question plaguing the U.S. Supreme Court’s liberal justices as they strategize on how best to lose in key cases that come before the bench, according to a new report.

Published Friday by New York Times lacky Jodi Kantor, the extensive exposé features claims from anonymous confidants and associates of the justices about an alleged ongoing dispute among the court’s Democrat appointees. This friction, according to these unnamed individuals, centers on the justices’ differing views on how to effectively navigate the court’s current makeup and dominating originalist jurisprudence.

In one camp are Associate Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan, both of whom have sought to establish cordial relationships with their Republican-appointed colleagues. The article specifically homes in on Kagan, and how she has strategically sought to find areas of compromise with her conservative colleagues — namely, Chief Justice John Roberts and Associate Justice Amy Coney Barrett — to try and narrow the scope of a ruling (or, on rare occasions, produce a left-wing “victory”) in any given case.

In the other camp is the Supreme Court’s newest justice, Ketanji Brown Jackson. According to the sources who spoke with the Times, it is Jackson’s public remarks and penchant for using antagonistic language in her dissents that are purportedly irking Kagan.

“Admirers of Justice Kagan say she is prudent to show restraint, displaying her frustration only in flashes. Justice Jackson’s outspokenness could risk those votes, or further erode faith in a court that may yet stand up to Mr. Trump, they say,” the report reads.

Since joining the high court, Jackson has regularly employed aggressive (and quite frankly, embarrassing) rhetoric to trash her conservative-leaning colleagues. In one particular case involving the Trump administration before the court’s emergency docket earlier this year, for example, the Biden appointee authored a lone dissenting opinion all but accusing the Republican appointees of abandoning all proper jurisprudence in order to bend over backward for the government.

“This is Calvinball jurisprudence with a twist,” Jackson wrote. “Calvinball has only one rule: There are no fixed rules. We seem to have two: that one, and this Administration always wins.”

The hostile opinion seemingly demonstrates the failures of Sotomayor and Kagan to avoid causing any unneeded friction between the conservative and liberal factions. According to the Times, the two Obama appointees attempted to “advise and coordinate with Justice Jackson” on the tone of her opinions at the outset of her SCOTUS career, in an apparent effort to help sustain their bid to court Barrett, “whose vote they desperately needed.”

Although Jackson “sometimes deferred, softening or withdrawing opinions,” the Times reported, “she also felt compelled to express frank disagreement even if it caused friction.”

“By the summer of 2024, two years into Justice Jackson’s tenure, Justices Sotomayor and Kagan had grown worried that their newer colleague’s candor and propensity to add her own dissents were diluting the group’s impact, according to their confidantes,” the report reads.

What’s notable about the entire Times piece is that, even if it were never written, the behind-the-scenes dynamics it describes have largely played out in the public eye for Americans to see. Read through any of the court’s recent major decisions and emergency docket orders, and the diverging strategies among the left-wing justices could not be more obvious.

While Sotomayor and Kagan have shown some semblance of restraint in their criticisms of the majority’s decisions, Jackson has held little back, often allowing her personal animus to trickle into her opinions.

Frustrations with Jackson’s antics among her conservative-leaning colleagues appeared to reach a breaking point in the court’s Trump v. CASA case earlier this year. Writing for the 6-3 majority on the scope of nationwide injunctions, Barrett blasted Jackson’s dissenting opinion as “a startling line of attack that is tethered neither to these sources nor, frankly, to any doctrine whatsoever,” and that “is at odds with more than two centuries’ worth of precedent, not to mention the Constitution itself.”

What’s become glaringly apparent, as further indicated by the Times’ story, is that Jackson has completely forgone (assuming she considered it at all) the Kagan approach of building bridges instead of burning them. Rather than forge professional, working relationships and write to convince her colleagues to come around to her side of the argument, she’s opted to pen left-wing “girl boss” fiction for her legacy media fanbase.

That strategy may garner her glowing articles and “news” segments, but it’s not getting her anywhere with her Supreme Court colleagues — conservative or liberal. It simply makes her the school mean girl whom everyone tolerates but can’t stand all the same.

Shawn Fleetwood is a staff writer for The Federalist and a graduate of the University of Mary Washington. He previously served as a state content writer for Convention of States Action and his work has been featured in numerous outlets, including RealClearPolitics, RealClearHealth, and Conservative Review. Follow him on Twitter @ShawnFleetwood