Who Will Be the First Black Woman on the Supreme Court?

Jackson, 51, currently a judge on the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, is widely considered the current front-runner. One possible key factor in her candidacy: the bipartisan support for her recent elevation to the country’s second-most-powerful court. Jackson, who was appointed to a federal trial judgeship by President Obama in 2013, received three Senate Republican votes when she was elevated last year to take the place of Garland on the Court of Appeals: Lisa Murkowski (Alaska), Susan Collins (Maine), and Lindsey Graham (South Carolina). All three would be crucial to any Senate vote on a Supreme Court vacancy. Plus, Jackson would continue the recent trend of former clerks taking the place of justices they clerked for. Early in her career, Jackson clerked for Justice Breyer, just as Brett Kavanaugh clerked for Justice Anthony Kennedy. A graduate of both Harvard University and Harvard Law School, Jackson also worked as a federal public defender in Washington and served on the U.S. Sentencing Commission, where she helped ensure that a reduction in penalties for drug-related offenses applied retroactively.

California Supreme Court Justice Leondra Kruger

Kruger, 45, has been a fast-rising star in legal circles in recent years and was the youngest person to be appointed to the California Supreme Court when then-Gov. Jerry Brown nominated her in 2014. She, too, has ties to the current Supreme Court, having clerked for the late Justice John Paul Stevens, Later, while serving in the solicitor general’s office in the Obama administration, she argued 12 cases in front of the Supreme Court. “Leondra Kruger is one of the handful of the most brilliant attorneys with whom I’ve ever worked,” Washington attorney Neal Katyal, who was acting solicitor general during Obama’s first term, told the Los Angeles Times on Wednesday. “I asked her to be my principal deputy solicitor general because I knew the advice she’d give me would be meticulous and deeply thought out, and most of all, honest: I cannot imagine a better justice.” Kruger earned an undergraduate degree at Harvard University and a law degree from Yale, where she served as editor in chief of the Yale Law Journal.

South Carolina US District Court Judge J. Michelle Childs

Childs, 55, a judge on South Carolina’s federal court who currently has a pending nomination before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, is said to have a major backer in her follow South Carolinian, James Clyburn. A graduate of the University of South Carolina School of Law, she spent a decade in private practice (during which she became the first black female partner in a major law firm in the state of South Carolina) before going in to serve as a state court trial judge on the South Carolina Circuit, as the deputy director of the South Carolina Department of Labor, Licensing and Regulation, and as a commissioner on the South Carolina Workers’ Compensation Commission.

Sherrilyn Ifill

The 58-year-old Ifill, who recently announced that she was stepping down after a decade-long tenure as president and director-counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, might be a long-shot candidate, but one with significant support from a lot of Democratic progressives. Rachel Maddow, in an interview with Ifill on the day of Joe Biden’s inauguration, suggested that the longtime activist (and sister of the late Gwen Ifill) was surely on the short-list for any future opening on the Supreme Court. At the time, Ifill played down that speculation, saying, that while she didn’t “have those kinds of ambitions … it’s great to have your name on those short lists.” That January 2021 interview was held, however, when Ifill was still at the LDF (founded by Thurgood Marshall in 1940), and in the two months following the surprise announcement of her departure, there has been plenty of buzz about what she might do next. Might it be taking a seat in the nation’s highest court?