https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/a39502071/ketanji-brown-jackson-harvard-law-review-sex-offender-registries/

As we enter Day Two of Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson’s encounter with the Republican reptile house of the Senate Judiciary Committee, I draw your attention to this piece by the essential JoAnn Wypijewski in The Nation. It is a look at Judge Jackson’s days at Harvard Law School, and is a clear window into a brilliant woman of principle who demonstrated both of these qualities from the very start.

It was 1996, and a Democratic president, to the immense delight of a Republican Party sliding towards neo-Confederate celebration, and with the unflinching support of a Democratic senator who would become president in 2020, was finding that old-time religion on law and order, triangulating countless nonwhite citizens into decades-long prison sentences. On this issue, everyone was a Nixon Republican. Young defendants were “superpredators.” Up at Harvard, in the pages of the Harvard Law Review, young Ketanji Brown had something to say about all of that.

What makes the young Ketanji Brown Jackson remarkable is her challenge to legal interpretations of a system of control over people who were not only made a separate category of human being then but are still largely shunned by reformers now. In a Harvard Law Review

Student Note titled “Prevention versus Punishment: Toward a Principled Distinction in the Restraint of Released Sex Offenders,” she placed the humanity of a despised class of people at center stage. Where might justice be, she asked in effect, if we begin by considering how state power affects the life and liberty of society’s most hated individuals?

The note goes on to harshly critique measures like the sex-offender registries that became popular in most states. Brown’s point was that the effect of these policies constituted further punishment for these individuals. And, as Wypijewski points out, the piece in which Judge Jackson made this criticism was anonymous, as is the case for all such HLR “notes.” Yet Judge Jackson outed herself as its author in a list of her published works.

The Note’s language is measured. In seeking a principled criterion for deciding whether a law is preventive or punitive, Jackson invokes the Constitution “as a bulwark against government encroachment on individual liberty” and concludes: “This Note argues that ‘[i]n a democracy, where safeguards are built in to protect human dignity, the effect of the sanction rather than the reason for imposing it must necessarily be [that] criterion.’”

So this entry in Judge Jackson’s CV is worth keeping in mind, seeing as how Senator Josh Hawley (R-Putsch) seems obsessed with the subject of sex offenders. She was smarter and more principled than he is now back when she was still a law student. And I will pay the judge a shiny buffalo nickel if, politely, she asks Senator Marsha Blackburn to define Critical Race Theory. My guess? Blackburn thinks it’s a study of the last three NASCAR events at Bristol.