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Know Your Rights
Source: Brookings
Subject: Immigration
Type: Media Coverage

Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson – what can we expect?

We don’t know everything that motivated Judge Jackson’s Make the Road decision, but we do know how she approached it. She carefully reviewed the claims made by the plaintiffs and each of the Government’s arguments. She parsed the language of the relevant statutes, one time consulting Black’s Law Dictionary for the precise definition of a term. She looked in detail at relevant precedent, explaining why some precedent was not on point while other precedent should be respected. She made fine distinctions rooted in law and precedent. Although she found for the plaintiffs, she rejected many of their arguments, intimating that she did not think the INA provided any basis for jurisdiction and barely nodding at their constitutional objections. She took more than 70 pages to lay out her reasoning.