The Justice John Marshall Harlan Lecture in Constitutional Adjudication presents Associate Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court Ketanji Brown Jackson in conversation with Deborah Pearlstein, Director of Princeton Program on Law & Public Policy, Charles & Marie Robertson Visiting Professor of Law & Public Affairs.

Biographies

Ketanji Brown Jackson, Associate Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, was born in Washington, D.C., on September 14, 1970. She married Patrick Jackson in 1996, and they have two daughters. She received an A.B., magna cum laude, from Harvard-Radcliffe College in 1992, and a J.D., cum laude, from Harvard Law School in 1996. She served as a law clerk for Judge Patti B. Saris of the U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts from 1996 to 1997, Judge Bruce M. Selya of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit from 1997 to 1998, and Justice Stephen G. Breyer of the Supreme Court of the United States during the 1999 Term. After three years in private practice, she worked as an attorney at the U.S. Sentencing Commission from 2003 to 2005. From 2005 to 2007, she served as an assistant federal public defender in Washington, D.C., and from 2007 to 2010, she was in private practice. She served as a Vice Chair and Commissioner on the U.S. Sentencing Commission from 2010 to 2014. In 2012, President Barack Obama nominated her to the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, where she served from 2013 to 2021. She was appointed to the Defender Services Committee of the Judicial Conference of the United States in 2017, and the Supreme Court Fellows Commission in 2019. President Joseph R. Biden, Jr., appointed her to the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit in 2021 and then nominated her as an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court in 2022. She took her seat on June 30, 2022.

Deborah Pearlstein is Director of the Princeton Program in Law and Public Policy and Charles and Marie Robertson Visiting Professor of Law and Public Affairs. Before joining Princeton, she was Professor of Law and Co-Director of the Floersheimer Center for Constitutional Democracy at Cardozo Law School, Yeshiva University, and held visiting appointments at the University of Pennsylvania Law School and Georgetown University Law Center. Her work on the U.S. Constitution, international law, democracy, and national security has been published in leading journals, including the law reviews of the University of Pennsylvania, Michigan, Georgetown, and Texas, as well as peer-reviewed journals including the Journal of American Constitutional History and Constitutional Commentary. Her article, The Executive Branch Anticanon, was selected by the AALS National Security Law Section as the best paper of 2020.  Her first book, Losing the Law, is forthcoming with Princeton University Press in 2026.  Pearlstein’s work has also appeared frequently in popular venues such as The Atlantic, Foreign Policy, the Washington Post, and The New York Times, and she has repeatedly testified before Congress on topics from executive war powers to congressional oversight. Professor Pearlstein has served as Chair of the AALS National Security Law Section, as a member of the ABA’s Advisory Committee on Law and National Security, and on the editorial board of the peer-reviewed Journal of National Security Law and Policy. In 2021, she was appointed to a U.S. State Department Advisory Committee focused on helping to ensure the timely declassification and publication of government records surrounding major events in U.S. foreign policy.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard Law School, Professor Pearlstein clerked for Judge Michael Boudin of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit, then for Justice John Paul Stevens of the U.S. Supreme Court. Before entering academia, she practiced at the law firm of Munger, Tolles & Olson in San Francisco, earning the Voting Rights Award from the ACLU of Southern California for her litigation work on voting systems reform following the 2000 presidential election. From 2003-2007, Professor Pearlstein served as the founding director of the Law and Security Program at Human Rights First, where she led the organization’s efforts in research, litigation and advocacy surrounding U.S. detention and interrogation operations, and served on the first team of independent military commission monitors to visit the U.S. Naval Base at Guantanamo Bay in 2004. In addition to developing impact litigation strategies and preparing multiple briefs amicus curiae to the U.S. Supreme Court, Pearlstein co-authored a series of reports on the human rights impact of U.S. national security policy, including Command’s Responsibility, which provided the first comprehensive accounting of detainee deaths in U.S. military custody and received extensive media attention worldwide. Throughout her tenure, Professor Pearlstein worked closely with members of the defense and intelligence communities, including in helping to bring together retired military leaders to address key policy challenges in U.S. counterterrorism operations.

Before embarking on a career in law, Pearlstein served in the White House from 1993 to 1995 as a Senior Editor and Speechwriter for President Clinton.

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