Court pick defies categorization
Jackson has shown fairness in labor cases
DETROIT – Labor unions and worker advocates have applauded President Joe Biden’s nomination of Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson for the Supreme Court. Yet, a look back at Jackson’s decisions in cases involving business and labor suggest that she won’t always rule as they want or expect.
Although Jackson is widely seen as a liberal on social and economic issues and as a defender of workers’ rights, her decisions, as a federal district court judge and then as a federal appellate judge since last year defy easy categorization.
“She’s as likely to rule for a corporation in a race discrimination claim as she is for the plaintiff,” said Ted Ruger, dean of the University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School, who served with Jackson on the Harvard Law Review during law school. “Like any judge who follows the law and listens to the evidence in the case, she may disappoint some who always want a predictably liberal outcome.”
Out of 40 employment and businessrelated rulings reviewed by the Associated Press, Jackson ruled for the defendants 30 times since 2013 while serving as a judge on the U.S. District Court in Washington. Many of the cases involved discrimination claims that employees had filed against government agencies. And they hinged largely on interpretations of arcane provisions of employment laws.
In her first opinion as a federal appeals court judge, a position to which Jackson was confirmed last year, she ruled against President Donald Trump in a case praised by labor unions.
In 2019, the U.S. education and agriculture departments had asked the Federal Labor Relations Authority, which oversees federal labor agreements, to adopt a new threshold for when collective bargaining would be required. In September 2020, the authority required bargaining only if a workplace change had a “substantial impact on a condition of employment.”
Employee unions sued, saying the new standard diminished their bargaining rights. Since the mid-1980s, the labor authority had required bargaining in cases where there had been more than a minimal change in working conditions.
In a victory for the unions, Jackson ruled that the decision to override 35 years of precedent was “arbitrary and capricious.” She also questioned whether the change would solve the problems the agency had claimed it was trying to fix.
But Curt Levey, president of the Committee for Justice, a Washington group that promotes conservative judicial nominees and limited government, argued that the case was an example of Jackson having reflexively ruled against the Trump administration. When Levey studied her record before she was confirmed for the appellate court, he said, “she seemed hostile to the Trump administration.”