Justice Jackson keeps calling out what she sees as needless Supreme Court interventions

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.

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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.