‘Savor every moment,’ Ketanji Brown Jackson, my mentor, told me | Opinion

Ketanji Brown Jackson, President Joe Biden’s Supreme Court nominee who is set for a confirmation vote before the Senate this week, has an impeccable resume: two Harvard honors degrees and varied and relevant experience. She also displayed impressive poise, temperament, and knowledge during her confirmation hearing. But perhaps what is most remarkable about Judge Jackson are two things that her friend professor Lisa Fairfax mentioned while introducing her at the confirmation hearing, but have otherwise received scant attention: her resilience and championing of people around her.

I saw those attributes about 20 years ago when we were the only two Black associates in the litigation department of a large law firm in Boston. I was in my first year there and she was a sixth-year associate, though she had been at the firm for only one year when I got there. Someone at work once asked me if we were both African because of our names. (My first name is not African, but I am. Her name — Ketanji Onyika — is African, but she is not.)

She was a diligent, detail-oriented, and skilled advocate. Even as a young attorney, she could take a complicated issue, deconstruct it, and explain it to you as though it was the most straightforward matter in the world. Jackson is simply one of the best lawyers I have ever seen.

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But what also stays with me about my time working with Jackson are the sacrifices she had to make at the beginning of her path to success. She alluded to this at her confirmation hearing when she addressed her daughters, Talia and Leila: “Girls, I know it has not been easy as I’ve tried to navigate the challenges of juggling my career and motherhood. And I fully admit that I did not always get the balance right.”

I know that was real, because when I first met Jackson, she had a toddler, and her husband, Patrick Jackson, was a surgery resident. Jackson had to attend to a taxing job full of long days and unpredictable hours at the office while ensuring that her daughter had the attention, care, and love she needed at home. As a young man with no children at the time, even then I saw how challenging it was to achieve at a high level while doing it all. I could not imagine how she managed everything.

Despite having precious little time to spare, she was willing to give space to support younger attorneys like me. Though she was a fellow associate, I looked up to her (though not literally, since I am a foot taller). In that first year of my career, in a law firm where I didn’t know anyone before I started, Judge Jackson was someone who I leaned on to help me navigate my new and unfamiliar workplace.

Our conversations often strayed from work to other aspects of our careers, including the importance of considering all of my options instead of being wedded to a particular path. She always underscored the value of clerking — as she did for three judges, including Justice Stephen Breyer — as the ultimate legal apprenticeship. Though I was initially resistant to that career pivot because of the steep pay cut, I warmed up to it as she told me how close she had become to her judges. I eventually heeded her advice and left the firm to clerk for a federal trial judge in Boston. That federal judge later became a friend and mentor, just as Judge Jackson had predicted.

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By that point, she had returned to Washington, D.C., to continue to write the next chapter in her great American story. I thanked her for providing me guidance and she couldn’t have been happier for me, even from afar. She kept reminding me to savor every moment of my legal career, and I tried to follow that advice. To this day, I am grateful for her friendship and guidance in ways that she probably does not know or I have never articulated.

Judge Jackson is someone for whom life, in the words of the great Langston Hughes, “ain’t been no crystal stair,” as she tried to balance the demands of work and home. Yet she persisted. And given the way that her daughter Leila looked at her in that now-famous photo, her persistence has paid off. Beyond that, it is Judge Jackson’s open admission about her sacrifices that will resonate with — and inspire — millions of Americans, especially many women who face similar, impossible choices between parenthood and career.

I can’t wait to see Judge Jackson get confirmed — with Republican support, no less — and take the oath as the next associate justice of the United States Supreme Court. It will be historic. She will be the 116th justice in the 233-year history of the court. There have been 108 white men, four white women, two Black men, one Latina, and, finally — oh, finally — one Black woman. So let’s echo Sen. Cory Booker by affirming loud enough so everyone can hear: She has earned this spot, she is worthy, she is a great American.

Sozi Pedro Tulante is a partner at Dechert LLP in Philadelphia and served as Philadelphia city solicitor from 2016 to 2018.