If anyone was a poster child for the pitfalls of diversity hiring, it’s Ketanji Brown Jackson. Remember that she was hired specifically for the prime qualifications of being a black female. Legal nous was clearly a very, very, distant third, behind even basic biology.
Remember, after all, that Jackson’s star moment in her confirmation hearings was her dumbfounded inability to answer such a simple question as, ‘What is a woman?’
Which may be the only time she’s ever actually been at a loss for words. Because, as her record shows, she talks a lot. An analysis of the first eight Supreme Court hearings she participated in shows that her word count reached an astonishing 11,003 words. That’s over twice as much as the next Chatty Kathy on the bench, Amy Coney Barrett (4,475 words). Four times as much as the most motor-mouthed male justice, Stephen Breyer. By contrast, Clarence Thomas was a model of taciturnity, uttering less than one hundred.
In the words of journalist Jason Whitlock (safely black, as it happens), Jackson “talks too much, which causes her to say dumb things”.
Her latest outpouring of dumb things is her lone dissenting opinion in Trump v CASA, which ruled that federal judges do not have the authority to issue nationwide injunctions that go beyond relief for individual plaintiffs on cases. An opinion so mind-bogglingly dumb that Barrett wrote scathingly that it was, “a startling line of attack that is tethered neither to [the Judiciary Act of 1789 and our cases on equity] nor, frankly, to any doctrine whatsoever”.
Barrett went on to excoriate Jackson for apparently finding the, y’know, actual law, “boring”. Because, Barrett says, Jackson seems to find “analyzing the governing statute involves boring ‘legalese’.” Presumably she finds playing dress-ups and gurning for the crowd on Broadway much more riveting stuff.
Indeed, her Supreme Court colleagues appear to be struggling to figure out just what she’s saying when she runs off at the mouth.
Barrett wrote the majority opinion, which sided with the Trump administration. In her ruling, the conservative justice said her liberal colleague’s “position is difficult to pin down.”
“She might be arguing that universal injunctions are appropriate – even required – whenever the defendant is part of the Executive Branch,” Barrett wrote. “If so, her position goes far beyond the mainstream defense of universal injunctions.”
Barrett went on to describe the dissent as “more extreme still,” and said that Jackson’s opinion “is at odds with more than two centuries’ worth of precedent, not to mention the Constitution itself.”
“We observe only this: Justice Jackson decries an imperial executive while embracing an imperial judiciary,” she wrote.
Even more damning are questions over whether she relied on AI to write her judgement.
For instance, when one user ran her dissenting opinion through ChatGPT plagiarism checker (an app for checking school assignments), it returned an 80 per cent chance that it was written by AI. Others have pointed to telltale signs of AI generation, such as weird uses of ellipses and em dashes.
Other signs pointing to AI generation include, concludes another analysis, “overuse of rhetorical devices”. People have particularly noticed the curious insertion of “...(wait for it)...” in Jackson’s dissent, which, according to the AI-checker, is “uncommon in formal Supreme Court writing and feels like performative flourishes typical of AI trying to sound clever or dramatic”.
Or, equally possibly, a not-very-bright DEI hire shouting, ‘nomesayin’?’
Overall, the analysis says, though: “More likely than not, the passage was AI-generated. It mimics legal writing very well, but shows telltale signs... of machine authorship rather than a real judicial voice.”
Maybe Jackson used AI to do her assignment, or maybe she didn’t and she’s just kinda dumb. Neither possibility should fill Americans with great confidence.
