Ketanji Brown Jackson’s first few months at the fractured Supreme Court
CNNCNN — Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson has joined an institution of isolated chambers and archaic procedures. Jackson has joined the “cert pool,” by which justices’ law clerks band together to screen these petitions and write memos summarizing whether the cases should be granted and scheduled for oral arguments or outright denied. The “cert pool” began in the 1970s as a way to ease the court’s workload, and not all justices have joined over the years. Roberts himself told C-SPAN in 2009 that the arrival of a new justice can be “unsettling,” and in 2017, he and Gorsuch fell into some early squabbles, including over Gorsuch’s decision to skip a private justices’ session, soon after his confirmation, because of a previously scheduled commitment. Back in the early 1980s, after Sandra Day O’Connor, the first woman justice, joined the bench, she inadvertently irritated Justice Harry Blackmun by settling into a small justices’ private library.