PROFILE: Ketanji Brown Jackson calls out the fast pass, then makes Washington wait

Monday, 4 p.m. ET

A file on a desk

Monday, 4 p.m.

That is the time written into the docket of the Supreme Court of the United States, case 26A406.

On September 24, the government files a stay application there, addressed to Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson. The same day, she gives the migrants in the case until September 28 to respond, at 4 p.m. Eastern.

No immediate administrative stay. A date. A time.

Solicitor General D. John Sauer wanted something else. An immediate halt to the lower-court ruling while the Court thinks it over.

An airplane seat, a plastic bag

In the meantime, there is a line.

On one side, a government that says it canceled a flight to three countries carrying 70 people with criminal convictions. On the other, migrants who do not know which country they will be sent to.

An airplane seat on one side. On the other, a plastic bag holding whatever they are allowed to keep.

The line is her image, not mine. She reached for it that same evening.

A date, a time, and everyone waits.

Thursday night, a lecture

In front of law students

Thursday night, September 24, Ketanji Brown Jackson speaks at the University of the District of Columbia School of Law, in Washington.

She is not talking about a ruling. She is talking about a method.

No names. No case. A method.

“Our modern methods are not serving the court or the country well,” she said, according to Courthouse News.

She rejects any effort to normalize a Supreme Court that actively supervises cases still pending in the lower courts.

The verb matters. Reject. Not regret.

The fast pass

Then comes the image.

If the Court is not careful, she warned, the emergency docket will become “an end-run around the standard review process.” A special avenue that “certain privileged litigants can use selectively.”

She asked the room to sit with that. Why should one party get “a fast pass to the Supreme Court” while so many others are “queued up, waiting patiently”?

A room full of law students is the sound of pens. Then silence, when a sentence lands.

The same day, a file is waiting on her desk.

A justice who talks about method is already talking about us.

What she did not say

No case named

Precision matters here. The temptation is strong.

She did not name the D.V.D. case. She did not name the solicitor general. She did not name third-country removals. Nor the First Circuit. Nor a single colleague, to blame.

Courthouse News makes the point. She kept to the Court’s processes as a whole, not to one specific decision.

So I will put no words in her mouth about this case.

What she thinks of it, she will write. Or she won’t.

Two facts, one day

What I have are two facts, dated the same Thursday.

A speech about the fast pass. A docket that sets a date.

The link between them is mine. I flag it as such.

A profile has no right to guess. It has every right to set two facts side by side.

Two facts on one day, and no sentence to connect them.

Washington, 1970

Harvard, then public defense

She was born in Washington on September 14, 1970, according to her official Supreme Court biography.

Harvard for her first degree, in 1992. Harvard again for law, in 1996. Then clerkships with federal judges.

She also clerked for Justice Stephen Breyer, Courthouse News notes. She would later take his seat.

Three years in private practice. The U.S. Sentencing Commission. Then federal public defense, from 2005 to 2007.

A lawyer for people who cannot afford one. Before she was a judge.

Public defender. Then judge. In that order.

Obama, then Biden

Barack Obama appoints her a district judge in 2012. Joe Biden elevates her to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit in 2021, then to the Supreme Court in 2022.

She is the newest arrival. Courthouse News describes her as the most junior of the nine, and the most outspoken on the emergency docket.

Four years on the Court. Dissent after dissent.

She learned the law on the side of the people who wait.

Four plaintiffs, one judge

March 2025, in Massachusetts

We need to say where this case comes from.

On January 20, 2025, an executive order from Donald Trump directs the Department of Homeland Security to remove noncitizens already under removal orders, SCOTUSblog recalls.

In February, then in March, the department spells out its guidance. Removals to countries not named in the original order become possible.

In March 2025, four immigrants sue in federal court in Massachusetts. They fear being sent to an unknown destination.

Murphy’s three requirements

Judge Brian Murphy sets three requirements, according to SCOTUSblog.

Written notice. A real chance to challenge the removal. Fifteen days to seek to reopen the case, once the fear of torture has been screened for reasonableness.

Three requirements. Not a ban on removals.

That ruling, upheld on appeal in September, is what the government now wants to suspend.

A notice, a deadline, a chance to say no.

June 23, 2025

The file she had sent up

This case is not new to her.

In the spring of 2025, a first government stay application in the D.V.D. case had already landed in front of her. She referred it to the full Court, the order says.

She did not decide alone. She sent it to her eight colleagues.

She lost.

On June 23, 2025, the Court granted the stay. Sonia Sotomayor wrote the dissent. Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson joined it, SCOTUSblog recalls.

The dissent opens on a principle: when life and death are at stake, caution is the wiser course.

One night

The dissent lays out what had happened before.

One man wrongly deported to Guatemala, even though an immigration judge had found he risked torture there. Six others sent to South Sudan, in clear violation of a court order, according to the text.

One night to learn the name of the country. One night to find out what waits there. One night to find someone to talk to. A few hours to say you are afraid. A cell, then the plane in the morning.

That is what the dissent she joined describes.

How long does it take to prove a fear?

One night is short for saying you are afraid.

June 27, 2025

An existential threat

Four days later, she writes alone.

On June 27, 2025, in Trump v. CASA, the majority limits the power of courts to block a presidential order for everyone. Sotomayor writes a dissent. Jackson writes one too, in her own words.

Letting the executive violate the Constitution with respect to anyone who has not yet sued, she writes, is “an existential threat to the rule of law.”

Not a mistake. Not an overreach. A threat.

The majority hits back

The majority, in an opinion by Amy Coney Barrett, answers her inside the ruling itself.

It declines to dwell on Justice Jackson’s argument, which it calls at odds with more than two centuries of precedent. Then it cuts. Justice Jackson, it says, “decries an imperial Executive while embracing an imperial Judiciary.”

That is the most serious charge anyone can level at a judge. It is written, signed, published.

I publish it too. A profile that left it out would be a pamphlet.

Her colleagues accuse her of wanting judges with too much power.

Calvinball

August 21, 2025

On August 21, 2025, in a case over National Institutes of Health grants, she writes one of her most quoted lines.

She compares the Court’s case law to Calvinball, the game invented in the comic strip Calvin and Hobbes.

That game has only one rule. There are no fixed rules.

The Court, she wrote, seems to have two: that one, and a second under which this administration always wins.

The line draws a smile. It is signed all the same.

The rising tone

June: a signature at the bottom of a dissent. Late June: a text of her own. August: an image everyone remembers.

The tone climbs a notch each time.

And yet, up to then, it all happens on paper. Inside the building. In the language of opinions.

Pages. Footnotes. Cross-references.

Three texts, three notches, and still inside the Court’s walls.

Outside the walls

The turn

On September 24, she steps outside the walls.

One justice. One lectern. A room of students.

Courthouse News flags it. Openly addressing an internal disagreement this sharp is, in its words, “an anomaly for the typically tight-lipped high court.”

This is no longer a dissent. It is a public lesson, in front of students, on how her own institution decides.

She recalls her years as a clerk at the Court. Back then, she said, the Court did not “relish the opportunity to enter a pending case as a de facto superintendent.”

She cites Antonin Scalia. A conservative. Known, she said, for declining to step in when nothing was urgent.

A conservative held up as the model of restraint. The gesture counts.

A stay application is discretionary, she reminded the room. Nothing obliges the Court to rule on the merits.

The rule she proposes

Then she proposes a rule.

First, a threshold of urgency. A party seeking a stay should have to prove an impending harm, one that cannot wait for the normal process to run its course.

Second, set the merits aside as far as possible. Weigh the competing harms first.

She also faults the Court for not applying the same standards to every application.

A simple rule. Written for everyone. The government included.

She left the dissent behind for the method.

The same-day choice

Fifteen months, then one night

That same day, the rule lands on her desk.

The First Circuit had kept a stay in place for 15 months. It lifted it on September 23 at 11:36 p.m., law professor Josh Blackman reports on the Volokh Conspiracy blog.

The next day, the government asks the Supreme Court to suspend everything. It is the third time in this case, the solicitor general writes in his application.

Four days

She suspends nothing for now. She gives the migrants until Monday at 4 p.m. to respond.

Four days. Josh Blackman sets that against the 14 hours Justice Brett Kavanaugh allowed in another recent case.

Not fourteen hours. Four days.

The solicitor general had seen this coming. If the justice sets a briefing schedule without an administrative stay, he writes, the stay request should be referred to the full Court.

A threshold. A response. Each party heard.

It is exactly the rule from Thursday night.

She applied at her own desk the rule she preached elsewhere.

The power of one justice

A judge who governs

Now the argument has to be turned against her.

One justice, alone at her desk, holds an elected government’s application for four days. Isn’t that, precisely, a judge who governs?

That was Barrett’s charge in 2025. In substance, it is Josh Blackman’s on Thursday: the application should go to the full Court right away.

The charge deserves an answer. Not a shrug.

What the docket shows

The answer is in the docket.

She did not grant a stay. She did not deny one on the merits. She set a date to hear the other side.

And the full Court remains free to act sooner. The solicitor general asked for exactly that, in writing.

In 2025, she had sent the case to the other eight. In 2026, she leaves the door open to them.

A schedule is not a decree. It is a hearing.

What the government argues

The cost of waiting

The other side has arguments. They deserve to be read in full.

The government says third-country removals are an essential tool for deporting certain noncitizens, including criminals. The government says it canceled a flight to three countries carrying 70 people with convictions, including for aggravated assault and serious drug offenses.

The government says it pulled nearly 150 people off flights to at least four countries. Another flight, it adds, to four countries, with 58 people aboard, was scheduled this week.

Every cancellation, Sauer writes, forces a new round of negotiation with the receiving countries.

That is their case. It can be defended.

The Mexico number

The application also cites 7,257 removals to Mexico of noncitizens of other nationalities since January 2025.

Those are real harms for a state. The justice’s rule asks precisely that they be weighed.

And yet a harm pleaded is not a harm proven. That is what four days are for. Hearing the other side before deciding.

A canceled flight weighs. So does a person wrongly deported.

If the Court moves faster

Before Monday

Nothing stops the majority from acting before Monday at 4 p.m. The solicitor general is asking it to.

If it does, it will have chosen the path the justice described on Thursday night. The fast pass. The party that cuts the line.

If it acts before Monday, it will not have read the migrants’ response. If it acts before Monday, it will have heard only one side. If it acts before Monday, the line will have been nothing but scenery.

Who, then, reads the response filed on Monday?

It would not be illegal. It would be a confession of method.

What speed costs

Jackson put it her own way on Thursday. Real harms follow stay rulings. When the Court’s orders ignore that, they “ring hollow.”

We cannot ask the public to have faith in the justice system, she added, if the Court keeps greenlighting harmful acts without explanation.

A two-line order, no reasons given, on a Friday night…

Speed is not a reason. It stands in for one.

What this says about us

Method before result

We have to watch not only what the Court decides, she said, but how it gets there. And whether it follows the same steps from one case to the next.

That is not an activist’s line. It is not a campaign slogan. It is not an attack on a person. It is a lawyer’s demand.

And it applies to us too. We judge courts by their results. Rarely by their method.

The reader in line

I admit it: I, too, read first to see who won.

And yet the line is not only about migrants. It is about everyone waiting for a court to hear them in turn, with no one jumping ahead.

An institution that speeds up for the powerful must slow down for someone else.

A waiting line is the simplest form of equality.

Monday, the line

Four dates, one calendar

June 23, 2025: she joins a dissent in this case. June 27: she writes alone. August 21: she talks about Calvinball. Thursday: she steps outside the walls. The same day, she gives the other side four days.

Her colleagues accuse her of wanting imperial judges. Her acts on Thursday fit on a calendar.

The judgment falls on the acts. They hold together.

We can dispute her doctrine. We cannot say she fails to apply it.

Who stays in line

When a country’s highest court moves faster for the government than for the people waiting in line, who still has time to be heard?

A date. A time. A line.

The docket still carries the same entry.

Monday, 4 p.m.

Washington wanted the fast pass. Jackson gave it Monday, 4 p.m.

Sources:

Primary Sources:

• Supreme Court of the United States — docket for case 26A406, September 24, 2026
• U.S. Solicitor General — stay application in DHS v. D.V.D., September 24, 2026
• Supreme Court of the United States — Trump v. CASA and Justice Jackson’s dissent, June 27, 2025

Secondary Sources:

• Courthouse News — Justice Jackson’s speech on the emergency docket, September 24, 2026
• SCOTUSblog — the government’s third request on third-country removals, September 24, 2026
• Reason, Volokh Conspiracy — Josh Blackman on the denied administrative stay, September 24, 2026