Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson stood out from her colleagues this week when she broke with them to rail against the high court’s decision to fast-track its landmark order dismantling a key provision in the Voting Rights Act.Â
But Jackson’s solo dissent was far from the first time the Biden-appointed justice has been on an island, as she has routinely blasted the court for not asserting more judicial authority over President executive actions and drawn rebukes from her colleagues for taking what they have viewed as flawed positions.
Ideological divides over high-profile cases have been common. The trio of liberals has remained unified against the Trump administration by opposing decisions, including on the interim docket, to curb universal injunctions, allow states to ban transgender medical treatments for minors, permit Trump to fire members of independent agencies, authorize the government to cancel immigrants’ temporary protected status and more.
But even in some of those cases, Jackson goes on solo diatribes, highlighting a deeper internal divide within the liberal bloc.
Below are five recent times Jackson gave lone opinions.
The Supreme Court struck down Louisiana’s map last month, finding 6-3 it contained an unconstitutional racial gerrymander.
Upon request, the Supreme Court also decided 8-1 to fast-track the landmark decision â handing it down immediately rather than in roughly a month like it usually does â allowing several red states to more quickly attempt to implement new congressional lines after the high court weakened Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act by limiting the role race may play in congressional redistricting.
Jackson, the bench’s most junior justice, broke with her eight colleagues in that decision, saying the court improperly “[dove] into the fray” of active elections by handing its judgment down immediately.
“Not content to have decided the law, it now takes steps to influence its implementation,” Jackson wrote.
Justice , joined by Justices Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch, wrote a scathing concurrence for the sole purpose of ripping apart Jackson’s dissent, saying her claims were “groundless and utterly irresponsible.”
The Supreme Court is still weighing Trump’s signature plan to severely limit birthright citizenship, but it first entertained the subject last year by addressing how lower courts across the country uniformly issued nationwide injunctions against the plan. The high court decided 6-3 to ban such injunctions but left room for judges and plaintiffs to deploy other methods when seeking widespread relief.
Jackson gave a rogue, separate dissent in the case, drawing eyebrow-raising jabs from .
“We will not dwell on Justice Jacksons argument, which is at odds with more than two centuries worth of precedent, not to mention the Constitution itself,” Barrett wrote in the court’s opinion in 2025. “We observe only this: Justice Jackson decries an imperial Executive while embracing an imperial Judiciary.”
Jackson wrote that nationwide injunctions should be permissible because the courts should not allow the president to “violate the Constitution.”Â
Barrett disagreed.
“She offers a vision of the judicial role that would make even the most ardent defender of judicial supremacy blush,” Barrett wrote.
The high court fractured last August in dual 5â4 decisions that allowed the National Institutes of Health to cancel nearly $800 million in research grants.
Jackson, in one of her most memorable one-person dissents, appeared to boil over with frustration, observing that the maj
