Like Ketanji Brown Jackson, the doubly Harvard-educated jurist who stands as Joe Biden's nominee to the Supreme Court of the United States.
On Tuesday Marsha Blackburn, the senior United States senator from Tennessee, asked Judge Jackson a simple question: "Can you provide a definition for the word 'woman'?" Jackson, a magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College and sometime supervising editor of the Harvard Law Review answered: "Can I provide a definition? No. I can't. Not in this context. I'm not a biologist." The judge, brow furrowed, seemed equal parts annoyed and genuinely confused.
Dan McLaughlin, a right-liberal lawyer and senior writer at National Review, argued on Wednesday that Jackson's answers before the Senate suggest that the late Justice Antonin Scalia's originalism has won out.
Scientists, gender law scholars and philosophers of biology said Jackson's response was commendable, though perhaps misleading.
The junior senator from Louisiana began by telling Judge Jackson, "I find you to be very intelligent-and very articulate. I'm still a little uncertain about how you think." After a long and awkward detour about court packing and a brief one on women's sports, he went on to ask the judge, "When does life begin, in your opinion?" Jackson raised her eyebrows, folded her hands, and said, "SenatorI don't.know?" She shook her head as she forced this out, and laughed uncomfortably in punctuation.
"Ma'am," Kennedy prodded, "Do you have a belief?" Jackson answered: "I have, um, personal, religious, and otherwise beliefs that have nothing to do with the law in terms of when life begins."
Either Judge Jackson genuinely does not interpret the law in light of any moral framework-in which case she would be no better than the braindead legal nihilists whose reign has delivered every judicial abomination from Griswold to Bostock and beyond in each direction-or the substantive vision that informs her jurisprudence would be so objectionable to the half of Americans who do know what a woman is and do not want babies murdered that she thought better of speaking it aloud before the Senate.
https://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/im-not-a-biologist/
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