It’s Worth Looking at Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson’s Actual Views on Punishing Sex Offenders

What makes the young Ketanji Brown Jackson remarkable is her challenge to legal interpretations of a system of control over people who were not only made a separate category of human being then but are still largely shunned by reformers now. In a Harvard Law Review Student Note titled “Prevention versus Punishment: Toward a Principled Distinction in the Restraint of Released Sex Offenders,” she placed the humanity of a despised class of people at center stage. Where might justice be, she asked in effect, if we begin by considering how state power affects the life and liberty of society’s most hated individuals?

The note goes on to harshly critique measures like the sex-offender registries that became popular in most states. Brown’s point was that the effect of these policies constituted further punishment for these individuals. And, as Wypijewski points out, the piece in which Judge Jackson made this criticism was anonymous, as is the case for all such HLR “notes.” Yet Judge Jackson outed herself as its author in a list of her published works.

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