WASHINGTON (AP) — When Ketanji Brown Jackson’s more youthful daughter was 11, she drafted a letter to the president suggesting her federal decide-mom for a emptiness on the Supreme Court docket.

“Dear Mr. President,” Leila Jackson wrote. “She’s decided, truthful and never breaks a promise to anyone even if there are other things she’d relatively do. She can demonstrate motivation and is loyal and hardly ever brags. I feel she would make a good Supreme Court docket justice.”

Jackson was not nominated for the emptiness her daughter was producing about, just one developed by the 2016 demise of Justice Antonin Scalia. And Republican lawmakers blocked then-President Barack Obama’s ultimate nominee, Merrick Garland, who is now President Joe Biden’s attorney general.

But Jackson might have one more shot.

She is deemed to be amid the best potential customers to exchange retiring justice Stephen Breyer as Biden seeks to fulfill a campaign pledge to nominate the first Black female to the court.

Jackson talked about her daughter’s letter in a 2017 speech. She stated the letter arrived about following her daughter learned there was a higher courtroom opening and believed her mother ought to apply.

“Getting to be on the Supreme Court isn’t definitely the type of work that you apply for,” she and her partner stated to their daughter.

Continue to, a little bragging does not damage.

Jackson has a track record similar to justices on the court docket and had captivated Obama’s notice as a doable nominee in 2016. She went to higher education and legislation college at Harvard. She also expended a 12 months early in her occupation serving as a regulation clerk to Breyer.

Her expertise as a public defender could established her aside, particularly simply because Biden has prized criminal protection and civil rights work in other people he has nominated for federal judgeships.

Jackson is on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, a place Biden elevated her to final year from her previous task as a federal trial court choose. 3 latest justices — Brett Kavanaugh, Clarence Thomas and John Roberts, the main justice — previously served on the exact same appeals courtroom.

Jackson was verified to the appeals court by a 53-44 vote, successful the backing of 3 Republicans: South Carolina’s Lindsey Graham, Maine’s Susan Collins and Alaska’s Lisa Murkowski. That could be essential to Biden, who has been achieving out for GOP assistance as he chooses a nominee. Another GOP relationship: Jackson is relevant by relationship to previous Dwelling Speaker Paul Ryan, R-Wis.

Jackson was born in Washington, D.C., but grew up in Miami. She has mentioned that her mother and father, Johnny and Ellery Brown, selected her identify to convey their pleasure in her family’s African ancestry. They requested an aunt who was in the Peace Corps in Africa at the time to ship a record of African girl’s names and they picked Ketanji Onyika, which they had been advised meant “lovely one.”

She traces her curiosity in the regulation to when she was in preschool and her father was in law university and they would sit with each other at the dining room table, she with coloring textbooks and he with regulation guides. Her father turned an legal professional for the county college board and her mother was a significant college principal. She has a brother who is 9 decades younger who served in the Army, together with in Iraq, and is now a law firm.

In substantial university, she was the president of her community high faculty course and a discussion winner. Richard B. Rosenthal, a lawyer who has known her considering that junior significant, stated there was no dilemma she would rise to the major of no matter what industry she chose, describing her as “destined for greatness.” His more mature brother, Stephen F. Rosenthal, a classmate and pal from Miami who also went to college and legislation college with her, referred to as her a “natural leader” and an individual with “penetrating intelligence.”

At Harvard she examined govt but also was associated in drama and musical theater and aspect of an improv team termed On Slender Ice. At one particular issue she was assigned actor Matt Damon as a drama class husband or wife, she has mentioned, acknowledging he almost certainly would not recall her. He does not, Damon confirmed through a consultant, but extra: “That’s so amazing!”

Also at Harvard she satisfied her partner, Patrick Jackson. The couple has two daughters, the letter-writer Leila, who is in significant faculty, and her older sister, Talia, who is in college.

Patrick Jackson, a surgeon, has a Twitter account that sticks almost solely to medicine. But on June 12 in a tweet that has given that seemingly been eliminated he posted to note an crucial authorized date. It was the anniversary of the Supreme Court’s Loving v. Virginia determination that struck down interracial marriage bans. “Happy Loving Day! I am in particular grateful to be strolling by way of life with a brilliant and compassionate spouse who still requires my breath absent, manufactured possible by sacrifices like Richard and Mildred Loving,” Jackson wrote, including a image of himself and his spouse.

The two married in 1996. From 1999 to 2000, Jackson was as a legislation clerk to Breyer on the Supreme Court docket.

Deborah Pearlstein, a regulation clerk to Justice John Paul Stevens the similar 12 months Jackson worked for Breyer, recalled Jackson as funny, insightful and “incredibly great at her occupation.”

“I really don’t know any person there at the time who didn’t get alongside with Ketanji,” Pearlstein reported.

Above the class of her profession considering the fact that, Jackson has worked for significant legislation companies but also was a public defender. Right after she was nominated to provide on the U.S. Sentencing Fee, the company that develops federal sentencing plan, she taught herself to knit to offer with the worry of the nomination and affirmation system, she has stated. As a commissioner, she was component of a unanimous vote to make it possible for thousands of individuals already in federal prison for crack-relevant crimes get their sentences diminished as a consequence of a new law.

Prison isn’t a distant concept for Jackson. Her uncle was serving a life sentence for a drug-relevant criminal offense right until it was commuted by Obama, in accordance to a in depth account in The Washington Post.

Jackson’s get the job done on the Sentencing Commission paved the way for her to turn into a federal judge, where by one particular of the issues she displayed in her business was a duplicate of a well-known, handwritten petition to the Supreme Courtroom from a Florida prisoner, Clarence Gideon. The Supreme Court docket took his circumstance and issued a landmark conclusion guaranteeing a lawyer for criminal defendants who are much too very poor to pay for 1.

In 1 of her most large-profile conclusions, she requested former White Dwelling counsel Don McGahn to show up ahead of Congress. It was a setback to former President Donald Trump’s effort to maintain his prime aides from testifying. The situation was appealed and a offer was ultimately arrived at for McGahn’s testimony.

A different hugely noticeable case Jackson oversaw associated the on-line conspiracy theory “pizzagate,” unfounded internet rumors about prominent Democrats harboring baby intercourse slaves at a Washington pizza cafe. A North Carolina gentleman showed up at the cafe with an AR-15 assault rifle and a revolver. Jackson named it “sheer luck” no one particular was injured and sentenced him to four many years in prison.

Jackson has a significantly shorter document as an appeals court docket judge.

Her 1st opinion, penned for a unanimous three-judge panel in favor of labor unions, came out in modern days. In before votes she joined colleagues in declining to stop the Biden administration from implementing a freeze on evictions put in spot through the coronavirus pandemic and ruled towards an hard work by Trump to shield paperwork from the Household committee investigating the Jan. 6 insurrection at the Capitol. Those people decisions were being appealed to the Supreme Courtroom and the justices authorized evictions to resume, but also allowed the documents’ release.

As significantly as the current Supreme Courtroom opening, in addition to the endorsement of her daughter, Jackson has also experienced the endorsement of the guy she would switch. When officials called Breyer in the class of her first nomination to be a federal choose, Breyer reportedly picked up the cell phone and started out the dialogue with two words and phrases: “Hire her.”