(Bloomberg Law) -- Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson described her return to law firm life after the birth of her first daughter as “wrenching,” saying she “drastically underestimated the challenges of new motherhood.”
“I can honestly say that going back into the office as a new mother, and returning to the cadence and pressures of Big Law, was the stuff of nightmares,” Jackson said in her memoir, “Lovely One,” which was released Tuesday.
She describes the challenges of commuting, breastfeeding, and having to slip out of the office apologetically “at the unspeakably early hour of five P.M. each workday.” And in particular, she details the isolation and lack of motivation she felt of returning to Goodwin Procter after four months of maternity leave.
For “me, there was a hollowness to the corporate law enterprise,” Jackson wrote.
‘Inconvenient News’
Discovering that she was pregnant in 2000 while still clerking for Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer, the court’s newest member and first Black woman candidly describes the “low-grade anxiety” she experienced showing up to her first law firm job six months pregnant.
Breaking the news of her “inconvenient news” was particularly unnerving because she’d received a “hefty signing bonus” from her “white-shoe” firm due to her high court clerkship.
Though she had a full time nanny to help, Jackson was primarily responsible for parenting, as her husband Patrick had just started his medical residency.
Coupled with the burdens of finding a secure place to store her milk while at work and the guilt of leaving her baby, Jackson said she found working at a firm as a new mother untenable.
It “ripped another piece of my heart out to know that I would miss the giggles and coos, first shimmies across the carpet, and other glorious developmental milestones,” Jackson said.
“I made it to year two,” Jackson said, eventually moving to a smaller practice.
During her time in private practice, which also included a later stint at Morrison Foerster, Jackson said that “more than once” she had older partners she encountered at an elevator bank or copier assume she was a legal secretary and inquire about “which of his colleagues she assisted.”
Other Revelations
Jackson, 53, is candid, particularly when it comes to the challenges of motherhood, in the memoir chronicling her life before President Joe Biden nominated her to the Supreme Court in 2022.
She reveals her older daughter Talia’s struggle with autism and what she said are her own regrets for not having sooner “grasped the true nature of our daughter’s neurological differences.”
“Unfortunately for Talia, her well-meaning, utterly devoted parents had some blind spots, likely stemming from a heightened work ethic that Patrick and I had internalized to an almost ridiculous degree.”
She describes disappointments with her husband as a co-parent, relying on nannies and au pairs to help carry the childcare load and taking 20-minute naps at a Washington-area Safeway supermarket parking lot while pregnant with her younger daughter, Leila.
There are lighter moments, too.
Nervous about the outcome of the 2012 presidential election, which would also decide whether her nomination as a federal trial court judge would advance, Jackson said she spent Election Day at an Elizabeth Arden Red Door Spa, emerging “pampered and massaged and preternaturally calm.”
And as a Harvard undergraduate, she writes of a “brief but memorable appearance” with actor Matt Damon in a drama class and includes a photo in the book of her sharing the stage with actor and humorist Mo Rocca in a campus production of “Little Shop of Horrors.”
Book Tour
Jackson has embarked on a cross-country tour to promote her book, appearing for news interviews Tuesday on CBS, NBC, PBS, and NPR as well as at the Apollo Theater in New York and on “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert.”
The audience in the packed 1,500-seat Apollo Theater cheered for and even sang along with Jackson, who briefly serenaded attendees with snippets of “Home” from the Broadway musical The Wiz and “I’m Just a Bill” from Schoolhouse Rock.
Jackson’s husband Patrick, who was in the audience, also got cheers from the audience after the judge recalled how the two met and fell in love at Harvard.
Gayle King of CBS News, who moderated the event, jokingly asked Jackson whether she’d dated Damon at Harvard. “That wasn’t in the book; I was just wondering,” King said as the audience laughed.
“At one point the professor paired me and him for a particular scene. So he was my scene partner,” Jackson said, adding that she hasn’t crossed paths with the actor since.
To contact the reporters on this story: Kimberly Strawbridge Robinson in Washington at krobinson@bloomberglaw.com; Beth Wang in New York at bwang@bloombergindustry.com
To contact the editors responsible for this story: Seth Stern at sstern@bloomberglaw.com; John Crawley at jcrawley@bloomberglaw.com
(Updates with Jackson’s Apollo Theater event beginning in fourth to last paragraph.)
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