On Tuesday, Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson issued her first published opinion as a D.C. Circuit judge. Her opinion for the panel in American Federation of Government Employees v. Federal Labor Relations Authority holds that the agency responsible for overseeing labor relations with federal employees failed to adequately justify its new standard for determining that an employer’s change to the workplace is so minor that it does not trigger a duty to engage in collective bargaining.
Last week I highlighted legal-writing guru Ross Guberman’s competing assessments of the legal writing of Supreme Court contenders Ketanji Brown Jackson and Leondra Kruger, a competition in which Jackson fared very poorly. So I figured that I should note that her opinion garnered a much higher BriefCatch score than the district-court opinions that Guberman had rated. I likewise found the opinion to be well written overall (though with a couple of passages that called out for editing).
Of course, there are some things well beyond the reach of the best diagnostic software. On the Volokh Conspiracy, administrative-law expert Jonathan Adler faults Jackson for what he sees as a surprising misstatement and misapplication of Supreme Court precedent.
While I’m at it, I will also note that on Monday I poked fun at a sentence in a New York Times article that stated that “Judge Jackson has not yet written a body of appeals court opinions expressing a legal philosophy.” I found that a rather strange way to obscure that she hadn’t yet written a single appellate opinion. Some yahoos on Twitter condemned me for supposedly implying that she was unfit for the Supreme Court because she hadn’t published an appellate opinion. That’s not an intelligent reading of what I wrote, and it’s also a position that I had already explicitly rejected.