Noah Feldman, Columnist

Breyer Retirement Could Lead to Court’s First Black Woman

There are two clear front-runners for the first opening in a new administration.

August 13, 2020 at 11:00 AM UTC

Noah Feldman is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist. A professor of law at Harvard University, he is author, most recently, of “To Be a Jew Today: A New Guide to God, Israel, and the Jewish People."

The Supreme Court could use a little more representation.
Photographer: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

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(This story was originally published in August 2020. Today, reports emerged of Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer’s coming retirement.)

Joe Biden has fulfilled his promise to choose a woman as his running mate. Let’s turn our attention to another promise he made: to name a Black woman to the Supreme Court.

A number of women with different kinds of legal experience have been suggested by NGOs and journalists. But to legal insiders, Biden’s options narrow down very quickly to two names: Justice Leondra Kruger of the California Supreme Court, and Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson of the federal district court in Washington, D.C.