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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsJustice Ketanji Brown Jackson is trying to warn us about something. Are we listening?
Last edited Sat Oct 4, 2025, 12:17 PM - Edit history (1)
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2025/oct/04/justice-ketanji-brown-jackson-supreme-courtJackson enters her fourth year on the supreme court on Monday. As its fiercest liberal voice wary of Trumps growing power, she faces an intense battle ahead
. . .
The footnote in question can be found in Trump v Casa, the June ruling that gave a big boost to Donald Trump by clipping the wings of federal judges and limiting their use of nationwide injunctions to block the presidents worst excesses.
Over 21 pages of taut dissent against Casa, Jackson decried the 6-3 ruling as an existential threat to the rule of law and a sad day for America. The ruling was profoundly dangerous, she wrote, because it gives Trump permission to wield the kind of unchecked, arbitrary power the Founders crafted our Constitution to eradicate.
Looking ahead, she added the decision would surely hasten the downfall of our governing institutions, enabling our collective demise.
This is strong medicine. But then there is footnote No 5, which takes her dissent to another level entirely.
. . .
Edit to add link to the text of the footnote - thank you, dweller.
https://www.politico.com/f/?id=00000197-b1f0-db52-a3b7-b1fdf7120000
Page 111 of 119 for footnote 5
(Her full dissent starts page 98 )

Eliot Rosewater
(34,276 posts)Page 111 of 119 for footnote 5
(Her full dissent starts page 98 )
✌🏻
erronis
(21,463 posts)themaguffin
(4,714 posts)CrispyQ
(40,278 posts)Biden hit it out of the park picking Jackson!!!
Gimpyknee
(784 posts)Or go to term limits.
Hekate
(99,674 posts)QUOTE
In (footnote number 5) she cites The Dual State by Ernst Fraenkel, a German Jewish labor lawyer who fled the Nazis in 1938. Fraenkels book analysed how the Nazis had created two coexistent legal systems.
There was the normative one that kept the economy of Germany running as usual. And then there was the separate legal system that operated alongside it, in which anyone deemed an enemy of the regime was stripped of all rights and subjected to arbitrary violence.
In the footnote, Jackson quotes The Dual Statess description of the way unchecked power is incompatible with the rule of law:
See E Fraenkel, The Dual State, pp xiii, 3, 71 (1941) (describing the way in which the creation of a Prerogative State where the Executive exercises unlimited arbitrariness
unchecked by any legal guarantees is incompatible with the rule of law)
The footnote is three and a half lines of small print. But its import is booming.
By citing Fraenkels work, the justice is drawing a parallel between the drift in jurisprudence that is taking place under the combined actions of Trump and the supreme court, and the legal structure of Nazi Germany.
END QUOTE
KT2000
(21,737 posts)Bobstandard
(2,031 posts)She must wonder, will the Trumpists subject me to house arrest, jail me, or worse? Assasination seems to be a right wing fad so that must be on her mind. And yet she persists.
KBJ, ladies and gentlemen, is a true American.