Is Ketanji Brown Jackson the great dissenter of the Roberts court?

To put it simply, the Trump administration’s recent request for interim relief in a dispute over its termination of nearly $800 million in health research grants split the Supreme Court. Four justices wanted to pause a district court’s ruling against the administration in its entirety, and four justices wanted the full ruling to remain in place. Because Justice Amy Coney Barrett voted partly for each side, the court’s Aug. 21 order was more complicated than most. The Trump administration could terminate the grants, the court said, but it couldn’t keep using the internal guidance documents that led to the grant cuts.

The fact that five opinions accompanied the court’s short, unsigned order, made the decision even more unusual. What wasn’t unusual is that the most impassioned one was a solo opinion from Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, who, in the three years since she joined the court, has quickly become its most conspicuous dissenter. 

In her 21-page opinion (which was three times longer than the next-longest opinion in the case), Jackson contended that the court had “ben[t] over backward to accommodate” the Trump administration and had done so in several other recent rulings on the court’s emergency docket – as relevant here, the cases that the court decides, normally on a temporary basis, without full briefing or oral arguments. “‘[R]ight when the Judiciary should be hunkering down to do all it can to preserve the law’s constraints,’ the Court opts instead to make vindicating the rule of law and preventing manifestly injurious Government action as difficult as possible,” Jackson wrote.

Just as Jackson’s sharp tone was familiar, so too was the pushback she received from her Republican-appointed colleagues. Justices Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Barrett all criticized Jackson’s opinion in their own writings, contending that she had misinterpreted the law and mischaracterized the significance of the court’s decision.

This late August sparring didn’t match the intensity of earlier rhetorical battles, but it still served as a reminder of Jackson’s current role on the court. While she may regularly vote and write with the other members of the liberal bloc, Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan, she doesn’t blend into the crowd. When Jackson wants to push harder than them against what she feels are abuses of power by the Trump administration, she does, typically by writing a solo dissent.

Indeed, since January, most of Jackson’s dissents have come in cases that the Trump administration brought to the emergency docket. In particular, she’s repeatedly emphasized the risks of what she sees as an overly powerful presidency and the danger of a court that does too little to rein it in.    

Jackson’s penchant for dissenting is reflected in SCOTUSblog’s Stat Pack: It shows that she was in the majority less often than any other justice during the 2024-25 term. Specifically, she joined it in 72% of all cases and 51% of non-unanimous cases resolved with opinions from the court. (By comparison, Kagan was in the majority 83% of the time in all cases and in 70% of non-unanimous ones.)

Additionally, Jackson wrote the fewest majority opinions (five) and the most dissents (10). And although Jackson was only once the lone dissenter (in Stanley v. City of Sanford, Florida), she wrote three solo dissents and a fourth that Sotomayor only joined in part.

The most notable of those dissents came in Trump v. CASA, a case on the legality of universal injunctions, which had prevented President Donald Trump’s executive order on birthright citizenship from going into effect nationwide. All three liberal justices dissented from the court’s opinion barring district courts from issuing universal injunctions, but Jackson wrote separately to warn that the decision was “an existential threat to the rule of law.”

“I view the demise of the notion that a federal judge can order the Executive to adhere to the Constitution—full stop—as a sad day for America. The majority’s unpersuasive effort to justify this result makes it sadder still,” Jackson wrote.

Her dissent was met with intense pushback, including from Barrett, who authored the majority opinion in CASA. In it, she criticized Jackson’s “startling line of attack.” “We 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,” she wrote. “We observe only this: Justice Jackson decries an imperial Executive while embracing an imperial Judiciary.”

Barrett’s rebuke sparked a flurry of commentary about Jackson’s relationship with her colleagues. Some applauded her willingness to clearly and boldly criticize conservative justices for regularly siding with the Trump administration, while others echoed Barrett’s point, contending that Jackson’s frustration with the president is causing her to let personal politics, rather than the law, guide her work.

The debate over Jackson’s dissents continued this summer, when she twice wrote solo opinions criticizing the court’s response to emergency applications from the administration. As noted above, one of those opinions came in August in the dispute over health research grants. The other came on July 8, when Jackson was the only justice to oppose the Supreme Court’s decision to pause a district court order that had prevented the Trump administration from proceeding with one of its large-scale reductions to the federal workforce.    

In that case, Sotomayor agreed with Jackson that plans to restructure federal agencies and fire thousands of workers might run afoul of “congressional mandates.” But unlike Jackson, she felt it was too early to determine whether that had occurred, so she wrote a concurring opinion instead of a dissent. Jackson, on the other hand, believed the court was making “the wrong decision at the wrong moment” and spent 15 pages reflecting on why her colleagues “should have left well enough alone.”

Opinions like that one help explain why some court watchers believe Jackson’s interest in calling out the conservative majority is creating a schism among the liberal justices. Kagan, in particular, appears to be more interested than Jackson in meeting conservative colleagues in the middle. 

That said, moments of tension between Jackson and her fellow liberals remain rare, even if they’re memorable. Last term, Jackson agreed with Sotomayor in 94% of cases that were decided with opinions from the court and with Kagan in 89%.

Those percentages may drop during the term ahead, when challenges to several of Trump’s signature policy moves are expected to be on the merits docket, but it’s more likely that Jackson will continue to vote with Kagan and Sotomayor and join their dissents, even as she expands on their arguments in fervent dissents of her own.