As the Supreme Court weighed a conservative attempt to weaken the landmark Voting Rights Act enacted in 1965 to protect minority voters, the first black woman to serve on the Supreme Court delivered a history lesson on the divisive issue of race in the United States.
Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson spoke about the enactment of the 14th Amendment of the Constitution, stressing how its aim was to redress historic harms to Black people in the aftermath of the Civil War and the end of slavery. It was a symbolic moment in a courtroom in which only three Black justices had ever sat.
Jackson said that the entire point of the amendment was to secure the rights of the freed former slaves, as well as to the history that lurks in the background of the dispute over Alabama's congressional districts map. She wondered how could the state be barred from considering race when deciding whether more minority Black districts should be drawn?
Her intervention in the midst of an oral argument on Alabama's defense of its map, a lower court said discriminated against Black voters was just one example of Jackson's active role in her early days on the high court.
Some new justices take a back seat in their first few arguments as they settle in, but the last three appointees before Jackson — conservatives Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett — all asked questions in their debut oral arguments.
Justice Jackson is showing no hesitation about entering the fray, according to Sherrilyn Ifill, a prominent civil rights lawyer, told NBC News. Her tone is upbeat and respectful, but she is tough, no nonsense and demanding. This was as impressive a debut as I have seen of a new justice in my more than 30 years of court watching. Jackson was quick to weigh in Monday during the first case of the court's new term, which explored the scope of federal authority over wetlands. She was the fourth justice to speak after about 10 minutes of the nearly two-hour argument.
Let me try to bring some enlightenment to it, she said at one point in the Clean Water Act when she was investigating a lawyer on the arcane language.
Jackson was the third most vocal justice in the wetlands case, while she spoke the most of the nine justices in the second argument on Monday, according to Adam Feldman, who tracks court statistics at the website Empirical SCOTUS.
On both days, Jackson was courteous toward lawyers but persistent in following up when her responses were not to her liking.
I'm sorry, can I just help? She said she was cutting off Alabama's lawyer on Tuesday.
Her line of questioning in the voting rights case, which the court will rule on sometime before the end of June, appeared to dovetail with the liberal justices Elena Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor. In previous high profile cases on race, Sotomayor, the first Latina on the court, has spoken most forcefully about how rulings can affect the lives of minorities.
The Supreme Court arguments can be lively, with cases on hot-button issues often exposing ideological divides on the bench, where there is a 6 -- 3 conservative majority. It has been referred to by lawyers as a hot bench for that reason.
An expert in election law at the University of Southern California Gould School of Law, Franita Tolson said Jackson has already shown her willingness to ask hard questions.
I think she will be a powerful voice in the court's liberal block because she understands the importance of setting the record straight, even if she will likely be on the losing side of a 6 -- 3 or 5 -- 4 vote, Tolson said.