President Joe Biden plans to nominate Ketanji Brown Jackson to the U.S. Supreme Court, the White House said Feb. 25.
Ms. Jackson is a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. If confirmed by the Senate, she will be the first Black woman to serve on the nation's highest court.
She would replace retiring Justice Stephen Breyer, for whom she clerked earlier in her career.
Three notes about Ms. Jackson with regard to healthcare:
1. Ms. Jackson previously worked as an associate in the Boston office of Goodwin Procter law firm. During her time in that role, she was one of the attorneys on an August 2001 brief supporting a Massachusetts law that established "a floating six-foot buffer zone" around pedestrians and cars approaching reproductive healthcare facilities, according to SCOTUSblog.
2. More recently, while she was a federal district judge, Ms. Jackson ruled that HHS unlawfully ended grant funding without explanation to three providers of teen pregnancy prevention programs, two years short of the programs' initial federal grants, according to Education Week.
"Because HHS terminated plaintiffs' grant funding within the meaning of the HHS regulations without any explanation and in contravention of its own regulations, HHS's action easily qualifies as an arbitrary and capricious act under the [Administrative Procedure Act]," Ms. Jackson wrote in the 2018 case.
3. Ms. Jackson's husband, Patrick Jackson, MD, is a surgeon at MedStar Georgetown University Hospital in Washington, D.C.