Welcome back, Deadline: Legal Newsletter readers. We've paused our regularly scheduled programming for the summer. In the meantime, Jordan Rubin looks at some interesting recent comments by Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson.
The newspaper comic strip "Calvin and Hobbes" had a fictional game called "Calvinball," the rules of which are made up and constantly changing. The only fixed rule is that you can't play it the same way twice.
The game appeared in a Supreme Court opinion Thursday, when Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson accused her colleagues of "Calvinball jurisprudence with a twist."
In a solo opinion on the Trump administration's quest to cut National Institutes of Health research grants, she wrote that in the court's version of Calvinball, "this Administration always wins."
It's a remarkable statement from a sitting Supreme Court justice — she was clear to specify "this" administration — and not the first time that she has struck out on her own to publicly address her colleagues in stark terms.
Jackson is one of three Democratic appointees on the court, along with six Republican appointees. This was the latest example of Obama appointees Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan declining to sign on to some of Jackson's strongest language. (All three Democratic appointees joined Chief Justice John Roberts' opinion in the NIH matter, a case that produced a tangle of separate opinions, including Jackson's.)
Read the rest of Jordan Rubin's article here.
