Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson stands out among her eight Supreme Court colleagues for one key reason: She’s had to weigh in on more legal questions related to the January 6, 2021, attack on the US Capitol than the other jurists on the bench.
Jackson, while serving on a federal trial-level court in Washington, DC, oversaw a handful of criminal cases against rioters as the Justice Department was making its first batches of arrests after the deadly attack.
“How close can a person be to unquestionably violent and completely unacceptable lynch-mob-like acts of others and still claim to be a nondangerous, truly innocent bystander,” Jackson asked in the case of one rioter whom she released from detention.
Some three years later, Jackson’s colleagues – all of whom were already members of the high court on January 6 – will also find themselves face-to-face with the harrowing details of that day when they are discussed Thursday for the first time in the ornate courtroom in sight of where the violent siege took place at the Capitol.
The case before the nine justices this week concerns an effort by a group of voters in Colorado to remove Trump from that state’s ballot under the Constitution’s 14th Amendment ban on insurrectionists holding office. The voters argue Trump “engaged in insurrection” through his conduct on January 6.
“The very fact that this case is going to the Supreme Court is a noteworthy milestone because it’s putting the court in the position of possibly having to address the question of whether what took place was an insurrection or not,” said Alexander Keyssar, a history professor at Harvard who’s taught courses on January 6. “That has not happened before in American history.”
The Supreme Court was closed to the public on January 6, 2021,…
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