The Gift of Ketanji Brown Jackson

In an exclusive profile and a new memoir, the history-making Supreme Court justice is telling her story.

- Jacqueline Woodson

At the halfway point in her memoir, Lovely One, Associate Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson recounts the story of Mrs. Mallard, the mother duck in Robert McCloskey's picture book Make Way for Ducklings, about a family of mallards living on a lagoon in the Boston Public Garden. The justice isn't citing McCloskey's book to wax poetic about the beloved books of her childhood-although this is clearly a cherished one. Instead, she is taking us inside a brain that I've learned is at once well-read and enchantingly creative, while at the same time steadfast and sure in its practicality. Weeks later, I will sit across from Justice Brown Jackson and realize I have never been in the presence of this kind of brilliant mind. But for now, I turn the pages slowly, fascinated from afar. The justice tells the story of the ducklings as a metaphor to describe Judge Patti B. Saris, the first judge she clerked for out of Harvard Law School. As Saris beaconed Brown Jackson toward a deeper understanding of social justice, the rights of women, and the law, amplified here is the nurturing provided. And, like McCloskey's ducklings, remembered.