Justice Jackson’s Combative Trump Record
Even before his inauguration on January 20, 2025, Donald Trump (and subsequently his administration) have appeared before the Supreme Court in a number of cases—including a presidential immunity case decided last year, a judicial powers case in June, and ongoing arguments over emergency tariff authority—that stem from Trump’s assertion of expanded unilateral executive powers. These asserted powers have largely, though not universally, found support from the majority of the Court’s justices, who granted “absolute immunity” for official presidential actions and limited the universal injunction power of federal courts, a significant check on the administration’s immigration policy, in the aforementioned cases, respectively. But the more skeptical justices on the Court’s liberal wing are not made equal in opposition to the administration’s view of executive power. Of the three, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson has in particular taken a combative line against what she deems executive overreach, setting her markedly aside from both her conservative and liberal colleagues on the bench.
Perhaps the most famous of Justice Jackson’s clashes with the administration was her dissent in the judicial powers case, Trump v. Casa, Inc. earlier this year. This case attracted national media attention for Justice Jackson’s spat with Justice Amy Coney Barrett, who tersely dismissed the dissent in the majority opinion, writing that “[w]e will not dwell on Justice Jackson’s argument, which is at odds with more than two centuries’ worth of precedent, not to mention the Constitution itself.” There, Jackson had painted the potential limiting of judicial injunction power to individual cases rather than all enforcement of an unconstitutional law in the stark terms of an “existential threat to the rule of law” posed by acquiescence to what was tantamount to an executive “request to engage in unlawful behavior.” In this way, she did not only squarely oppose the conservative majority, but also went significantly further than liberal colleague Justice Sonia Sotomayor, whose separate dissent—which Justice Elena Kagan and Jackson herself both joined—only dealt more narrowly with the legality of the government’s request to limit universal injunctions.
That is not, however, where Jackson’s suspicion of expanded executive power stops. She has pilloried the administration—to whose behavior toward the judiciary she referred as “the elephant in the room”—for seeking to “intimidate those of us who serve in this critical capacity [the judicial system]” and “undermining our Constitution and the rule of law,” breaking with longstanding court tradition of minimizing public involvement in potentially fraught political issue. Again, Jackson went beyond the more restrained public remarks of even her fellow liberal justices: Sotomayor, for instance, also spoke about the “battles” the legal profession is facing the following week, but focused on the positive work lawyers can do rather than the sources of the threats themselves. Jackson has also spoken publicly about her concerns about “the state of our democracy” and “not [being] afraid to use my voice” even when it differs from, for example, Sotomayor’s. And this willingness to stand alone on some issues is not a new development in response to lawsuits involving the Trump administration; Jackson’s record goes back to Trump v. United States in 2024, where she similarly wrote a dissent separate from the other liberals focusing not on “the Court’s flawed reasoning” but specifically the broader implications for “the paradigm of accountability for Presidents of the United States.”
Some of the oppositional role Jackson has staked out vis-a-vis the administration can certainly be tied to a seeming ideological disagreement with the rest of the Court. In the 2024-25 term, she joined the majority opinion in 72% of all cases and 51% of cases which produced non-unanimous decisions—the lowest of any justice, conservative or liberal, in either category. When presidential power is so tied up with judicial ideology, as it is today, it is easy to see how this lends itself to the relative isolation on the Court that that role has produced for Jackson.
The common thread in Jackson’s dissents and rhetoric is a caution about the molding of the executive into an overpowered entity independent of the other branches. As a single justice within a minority wing on the Supreme Court, this view’s jurisprudential impact is limited, at least in the short run. But in any case, her willingness to warn of such broad implications from the bench and speak about the same issues publicly earns her a rare role in the Court’s history; only time will tell how the executive power actually, if at all, changes, and if it does, whether Jackson’s warnings will be proven right.