Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson should be confirmed as the next associate justice of the Supreme

Court. Not because she is a Black woman, I aspire to a world where color and gender don’t matter. Not because she was nominated by President Joe Biden, I didn’t vote for him. Not because she’s got her bachelor’s and a law degree from Harvard. It’s been 44 years, and I still haven’t forgiven them for waitlisting me. Not because she’s ridiculously well-qualified (although actually I should probably pay attention to that).

Jackson should be confirmed because she brings a valuable historical first to America’s highest court, and it’s not what you think. Jackson will be the first Justice who was been a public defender.

Why does this matter? Because the entire federal judiciary (not just the Supreme Court) is disproportionately made up of judges who served as prosecutors or other advocates for the government. Attorneys who have dedicated their professional careers to protecting the rights of individuals against the government become federal judges far less often. That is not a healthy balance.

I know this is an issue thanks to a study by Clark Neily, a faculty member at George Mason University School of Law. (This school was recently named after former Supreme Court Justice Anton Scalia. Not exactly a font of radical lefty jurisprudence).

Neily discovered that there are four times as many former prosecutors and defenders on the federal bench. If you expand the distinction to attorneys who argued on the government’s side, vs. those who argued for individuals against the government, the ratio almost doubles. This is not good for America.

Despite being the land of the free, America has the highest incarceration rate in the world. This is not a contest we want to win, particularly since the rest of the top 5 are Rwanda, Turkmenistan, El Salvador and Cuba. Small wonder being a prosecutor is a good way to smooth your path to a federal judgeship or political office.

Naturally, conservatives are attacking Judge Jackson’s record as being “soft on crime.” This is like accusing someone of puppy killing or slave trading. Who could possibly be in favor of being soft on crime? What public defenders do is ensure the rights of all who must battle the government are protected. This includes those who have been convicted of crimes, but it is absolutely not limited to them. This is something we people of goodwill should support.

Being “tough on crime” has always been an Achilles’ heel for conservatives, who at least pay lip service to the idea of limited government. A country that incarcerates as many people as we do cannot do so without a large and well-funded prosecutorial and prison system. This in turn inevitably expands the scope and power of government. Drug prohibition, for example, has turned the constitutional protections of the Fourth amendment to shreds.

Should you find yourself at the wrong end of a tax audit, an irate government official with a grudge, a case of mistaken identity, or simply being in the wrong place at the wrong time, you will want your rights protected. Let’s not forget that over the past three decades, DNA testing has exonerated several hundred of your fellow Americans who were wrongly convicted of serious crimes. They spent an average of 14 years behind bars. Mistakes happen. Lives get ruined.

The highest court in the land, and the courts below it, should not be disproportionally made up of criminal prosecutors and professional government advocates. Nor should it be disproportionally composed of public defenders and public interest lawyers. Ideally, they’d be represented more or less equally. Having a former public defender on the Supreme Court for the first time in America’s history is a small step, but an important one.

As is too often the case, our nation is so divided on this issue that taking a centrist position seems radical by comparison. Supposedly, I must either be worried about the rights of the poor and downtrodden, or the rights of victims and people to be safe from harm. Why can’t I have both?