By David Leonhardt

Good morning. Ketanji Brown Jackson is both similar to and different from the justices she would be joining — and not only because of her race and gender.

The poor and powerless

There have been three main career paths to becoming a federal judge in recent decades: defending corporate clients, serving as a prosecutor or working in politics. Many judges have followed more than one of the paths.

The Supreme Court reflects this pattern. Seven current justices worked as corporate lawyers at some point (Amy Coney Barrett, Neil Gorsuch, Elena Kagan, Brett Kavanaugh, John Roberts, Sonia Sotomayor and Clarence Thomas). Seven worked either in the White House or in a cabinet department (Gorsuch, Kagan, Kavanaugh, Roberts, Thomas, Samuel Alito and Stephen Breyer). Five worked as prosecutors (Alito, Breyer, Kavanaugh, Sotomayor and Thomas).

Ketanji Brown Jackson, whose confirmation hearings began yesterday, fits the pattern, too. She spent seven years as a corporate lawyer, in Boston and Washington, including a year at the same boutique firm where Barrett once worked and Kavanaugh spent a summer.

But Jackson has also held a job that makes her distinct from any current justice — and that job is shaping her confirmation hearings.

She spent two and a half years as a federal public defender in Washington, representing defendants who could not afford to hire a private lawyer. In that role, unlike many other legal jobs, she could not choose whom she did and did not represent.

Her time as a public defender means that she would become the only current justice who has spent a substantial amount of time defending poor people. It also seems to be consistent with her judicial philosophy. At other points in her career, Jackson wrote articles about unfairness in the justice system and served on the federal Sentencing Commission, which took steps to reduce mass incarceration.

“Professional experience isn’t necessarily destiny,” Irin Carmon of New York magazine notes. But previous experience probably does influence a judge’s outlook, Carmon explains, and the federal judiciary is now heavily weighted toward judges with backgrounds representing the rich and powerful.

Jackson’s background, even with her seven years in corporate law, is a bit different. It is both more middle class and more varied.

She would be the first Black woman to serve as a justice and only the third Black person, after Thomas and Thurgood Marshall. Her family includes people who have worked in law enforcement (a police chief, an undercover officer and a sex-crime investigator) and somebody who spent years in prison (an uncle who received a life sentence in 1989 on cocaine charges).

Her parents worked as public-school teachers and administrators, and Jackson graduated from a public high school in the Miami area (the same one that Jeff Bezos attended). If she is confirmed, she would become only the third public high school graduate on the new court, along with Alito and Kagan. “Every other member of the court is a graduate of a Catholic high school,” The Times’s Linda Greenhouse has written. All the justices — as well as Jackson, a Harvard graduate — attended private colleges.

A subtle shift

Jackson’s presence would do little to change the court’s ideological balance. She is a Democratic appointee nominated to replace a Democratic appointee (Breyer, for whom she clerked) on a court dominated by Republican appointees. And on many of the court’s biggest cases, a justice’s partisan background predicts his or her vote. Jackson will often be writing or signing dissents, along with Kagan and Sotomayor.

Still, Jackson’s background is relevant. It has the potential to influence the court in subtle ways, and it suggests that the politics of criminal justice have shifted.

For years, presidents avoided nominating former public defenders, partly out of a fear that they would be tarred with the sins of their old clients, as my colleague Carl Hulse points out. Some Senate Republicans are trying a version of this criticism with Jackson, claiming that she is soft on crime because of her résumé. In a background paper on her, the Republican National Committee criticized her work as a public defender representing Guantánamo Bay detainees as “advocacy for these terrorists.” Similarly, Mitch McConnell, the Republican Senate leader, suggested Jackson had “a special empathy for criminals.”

But President Biden’s decision to nominate her and her excellent chance of confirmation suggest that the bipartisan movement to reform the criminal justice system has shifted the debate. Biden himself briefly worked as a public defender, before running for the Senate in Delaware, and his judicial nominees have had a striking amount of professional diversity. Almost 30 percent worked as public defenders, an Associated Press analysis found.

“Public defenders are not soft on crime — they are hard on injustice,” Laura Coates, a former prosecutor, wrote for CNN. “In a country where race and bias are far too frequently elevated above fairness, public defenders are the welcome foil to balance the system.”

More on the hearings

• “I evaluate the facts, and I interpret and apply the law to the facts of the case before me, without fear or favor,” Jackson said in her opening statement.
• Jackson said she stood “on the shoulders” of Constance Baker Motley, the first Black female federal judge.
• Republican senators complained about the accusation of sexual assault against Kavanaugh during his 2018 confirmation hearing. “No one is going to inquire into your teenage dating habits,” Senator Ted Cruz told Jackson.
• Senators will ask Jackson direct questions today.
• Cordial and largely substance-free: Jackson knows the playbook for a successful hearing, The Times’s Adam Liptak writes.

THE LATEST NEWS

• Taking Kyiv remains Russia’s primary objective, British intelligence officials say. A missile strike reduced a shopping mall in the city to smoldering ruins.
• Russia also continued its strikes elsewhere in Ukraine. “My city is dying a painful death,” a resident of Mariupol said.
• The U.S. opposes Poland’s idea of sending troops into Ukraine. Biden will travel to Brussels tomorrow for a NATO meeting.
• Biden warned U.S. companies that Russia was considering cyberattacks in retaliation for sanctions.

• A new generation of smaller nuclear weapons may raise the risk of their use.
• Companies in Europe are posting job openings for displaced Ukrainians.
• Two A.P. journalists who covered the siege in Mariupol have escaped the city after Russian forces tried to hunt them down.
• For two decades, the Russian oligarch Roman Abramovich placed billions in American assets through secretive, roundabout setups.
• Vanessa Friedman, The Times’s fashion critic, on the symbolism of Volodymyr Zelensky’s olive green T-shirt.

• The U.S. accused Myanmar of committing genocide against Rohingya Muslims.
• Missouri Republicans called on Eric Greitens, a former governor running for the Senate, to drop out, after his ex-wife accused him of abusing her and their son.
• Indiana’s Republican governor vetoed a bill that would have banned transgender girls from competing in school-sanctioned girls’ sports.

• Rescue workers haven’t found any survivors from the China Eastern Airlines plane that crashed in a mountainous region of China yesterday.
• The number of Americans who died of alcohol-related causes surged during the pandemic’s first year.
• Miami Beach officials installed a curfew after two shootings. “We don’t ask for spring break,” the mayor said. “We just endure it.”
• Portraits of three lives derailed: Two men who were shot to death and the man the police believe killed them had fought the same scourge: severe mental illness.
• A copy of the 1939 “Marvel Comics No. 1” sold at auction for $2.4 million.

The sexual revolution has left young people liberated but miserable, The Washington Post’s Christine Emba argues. Times Opinion’s Michelle Goldberg thinks that many women aren’t yet free to express their emotional desires.

Democrats’ focus on progressive mottos is driving Hispanics toward Republicans, Mike Madrid writes.

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MORNING READS

Talk: John Waters on the value of drugs, filth and comedy.

Science: What separates humans from animals? It might be triangles.

A Times classic: A decade entangled with Adderall.

Advice from Wirecutter: How to clean razors, trimmers and clippers.

Lives Lived: The freelance photojournalist Sumy Sadurni was born in Chile and best known for documenting political resistance and gender issues in Uganda. She died at 32.

ARTS AND IDEAS

The homes of creatives

Seeking to spruce up your surroundings after spring cleaning? T magazine’s spring design issue explores homes where creative work gets done.

In Los Angeles, there’s a cocoon-like 1960s house bathed in shades of mauve formerly owned by the writer Anaïs Nin. (One of Frank Lloyd Wright’s grandsons designed the house.) In North Carolina, four Black artists are preserving the modest childhood home of the singer Nina Simone. Near Berlin, the artist Danh Vo’s farmhouse is a former agricultural commune that has become a lush retreat.

And for the color-averse, there’s no shortage of neutral designs from which to seek inspiration — though this children’s bathroom is a sugary pastel delight.

PLAY, WATCH, EAT

Try a one-pot meal with chicken thighs, vegetables and rice.

The third season of Donald Glover’s surreal comedy series “Atlanta” is set in Europe, as the fictional rapper Paper Boi goes on tour.

In “The Emergency,” Thomas Fisher writes about his work at a Chicago hospital and the inequities of American health care.

The hosts discussed Jackson’s Supreme Court confirmation hearings.

The pangram from yesterday’s Spelling Bee was heavily. Here is today’s puzzle — or you can play online.

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