WASHINGTON — President Biden on Friday said he would nominate Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson to the Supreme Court, elevating a well-regarded federal appeals court judge who if confirmed would make history by becoming the first Black woman to serve as a justice.
Mr. Biden’s decision, made after a monthlong search, fulfilled a campaign vow to nominate a Black woman to the bench, and set into motion a confirmation battle that will play out in an evenly divided Senate. He announced the nomination from the Cross Hall of the White House, flanked by Judge Jackson and Kamala Harris, the first Black woman to be elected vice president, whom he praised as someone who helped him make his decision.
“For too long our government, our courts haven’t looked like America,” Mr. Biden said in remarks delivered two years to the day after he made his campaign promise. “I believe it is time that we have a court that reflects the full talents and greatness of our nation.”
In Judge Jackson, 51, Mr. Biden selected a liberal-leaning jurist who earned a measure of Republican support when he nominated her to the influential federal appeals court in Washington, D.C., last summer — an accomplishment the president took pains to emphasize during his remarks.
If confirmed by the Senate, she would replace Justice Stephen G. Breyer, the senior member of the court’s three-member liberal wing, who announced last month that he would retire at the end of the current court term this summer if his successor was in place. Mr. Biden pointed out that Judge Jackson, a former clerk for Justice Breyer, was a jurist whose legal approach was informed by the justice she has been nominated to replace.
“Not only did she learn about being a judge from Justice Breyer himself,” Mr. Biden said, “she saw the great rigor through which Stephen Breyer approached his work.”
While her confirmation would not change the court’s ideological balance — conservatives appointed by Republicans would retain their 6-3 majority — it would achieve another first: all three justices appointed by Democratic presidents would be women.
“If I’m fortunate enough to be confirmed as the next associate justice of the Supreme Court of the United States,” Judge Jackson said in her own set of remarks, “I can only hope that my life and career, my love of this country and the Constitution and my commitment to upholding the rule of law and the sacred principles upon which this great nation was founded, will inspire future generations of Americans.”
Judge Jackson’s nomination was praised by Democrats, but few Republicans are expected to support her as a nominee. Shortly after the White House announced Mr. Biden’s decision, conservative lawmakers and interest groups criticized her Ivy League background and characterized her past rulings as too liberal.
“The Senate must conduct a rigorous, exhaustive review of Judge Jackson’s nomination as befits a lifetime appointment to our highest court,” Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the minority leader, said in a statement, pointing out that he was not one of the Republicans who voted in favor of her nomination last summer.
Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, who had voted for Judge Jackson last summer but had been a vocal supporter of another candidate, J. Michelle Childs, cast doubt on the idea that he would vote for her again: “The Harvard-Yale train to the Supreme Court continues to run unabated,” he wrote Friday in a Twitter post.
Judge Jackson, who was born in Washington, D.C., and grew up in Miami, graduated from Harvard College and Harvard Law School, Justice Breyer’s alma mater. She went on to clerk for him during the 1999-2000 Supreme Court term. Four current Supreme Court justices, including two nominated by Republican presidents, went to Harvard.
In her remarks, Judge Jackson emphasized her faith, her family and her humble beginnings. One of her uncles was Miami’s police chief, and another was a sex crimes detective. Her younger brother worked for the Baltimore police in undercover drug stings. And another uncle, Thomas Brown, was sentenced to life in prison in October 1989 for possessing a large amount of cocaine with intent to distribute it.
He was released in November 2017, after President Barack Obama commuted most of his remaining sentence, along with those of many others sentenced when so-called three-strikes laws sent many nonviolent drug offenders to prison for decades. Public records suggest Mr. Brown died about four months later.
“You may have read that I have one uncle who got caught up in the drug trade and received a life sentence,” Judge Jackson said. “That is true. But law enforcement also runs in my family.”
During her confirmation hearing to be a Federal District Court judge in Washington in 2012, Eleanor Holmes Norton, the District of Columbia’s House delegate, recounted that Justice Breyer had two words when asked about her eligibility for the post: “Hire her.”
When Judge Jackson was sworn in for the job in 2013, Justice Breyer did the honors. “She sees things from different points of view, and she sees somebody else’s point of view and understands it,” he said at the time.
Judge Jackson has also served as a public defender, a rarity among Supreme Court candidates. But it was a trait that appealed to Mr. Biden, who briefly served as a public defender earlier in his career.
She has also been twice confirmed as a judge by the Senate, including last year, when three Republicans voted yes in a 53-to-44 vote to approve her elevation to the powerful U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, a traditional proving ground for potential justices. The three Republicans who voted to confirm her — and who will be under pressure from Democrats to do so again in the evenly divided Senate — were Senators Susan Collins of Maine, Mr. Graham and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska.
Judge Jackson was chosen from a short list that also included Leondra R. Kruger of the California Supreme Court, a former law clerk on the Supreme Court whose Yale Law pedigree is shared by four of the current justices, and Judge Childs, a Federal District Court judge in South Carolina, a state whose Black voters Mr. Biden has credited with helping him win the presidency.
In her short time on the federal appeals court, Judge Jackson has yet to produce a body of opinions that express a legal philosophy. But her earlier rulings as a district judge in Washington were seen as liberal leaning.
Her most notable decisions on the district court included blocking the Trump administration’s attempts to fast-track deportations, cut short grants for teen pregnancy prevention and shield a former White House counsel from testifying before Congress about President Donald J. Trump’s efforts to obstruct the Russia investigation.
“Presidents are not kings,” she wrote in 2019, issuing a ruling that Donald F. McGahn II, the former White House counsel, had to obey a congressional subpoena seeking his testimony about Mr. Trump’s actions. “They do not have subjects, bound by loyalty or blood, whose destiny they are entitled to control.”
As Mr. Biden was weighing his options from a short list of other candidates, Judge Jackson emerged as a front-runner among advisers who saw her as a logical choice, in part because she had already won Republican support for her confirmation to the appeals court. Merrick Garland, Mr. Biden’s attorney general, whose own Supreme Court nomination by President Barack Obama was thwarted by Republicans in 2016, was formerly the chief judge of the appeals court and it was his decision to leave the bench to serve in Mr. Biden’s cabinet that opened the seat Judge Jackson filled.
The president’s decision to elevate her to the appeals court was seen as a signal that, should he get the opportunity to name a nominee, she would be at or near the top of his list to fulfill his campaign promise during the Democratic primary season to nominate a Black woman to the court. Her background as a public defender also made her an unusual, but to Mr. Biden, appealing, choice.
“The law is not some esoteric thing to Joe Biden,” said Jeff Peck, a lobbyist who served as general counsel and staff director to the Senate Judiciary Committee when Mr. Biden was its chairman. “He wants to make sure there’s a justice who understands how the law impacts people in their day to day lives.”
Last year, when a Republican senator asked during the confirmation process whether she had been concerned that her work as a public defender could put violent criminals back on the streets, she argued that having such a background was an asset.
“Having lawyers who can set aside their own personal beliefs about their client’s alleged behavior or their client’s propensity to commit crimes benefits all persons in the United States,” she said in a written response, “because it incentivizes the government to investigate accusations thoroughly and to protect the rights of the accused during the criminal justice process.”
Judge Jackson has two daughters and is married to Patrick G. Jackson, a general surgeon at MedStar Georgetown University Hospital. She is related by marriage to Paul D. Ryan, the former House speaker and Republican vice-presidential candidate. (Dr. Jackson is the twin brother of Mr. Ryan’s brother-in-law.) At her 2012 confirmation hearing, Mr. Ryan testified in her support.
“Our politics may differ, but my praise for Ketanji’s intellect, for her character, and for her integrity, is unequivocal,” Mr. Ryan tweeted on Friday, echoing the testimony he gave in her hearing a decade ago.
