Ketanji Brown Jackson will be a superb addition to the US supreme court | Moira Donegan

Unlike most people nominated to the court, Jackson's career has included advocating for the rights of criminal defendants and the poor

She has always wanted this. Ketanji Brown Jackson, President Biden's nominee to fill the supreme court seat left vacant by the retirement of Stephen Breyer at the end of this term, said that she wanted to become a judge one day in the yearbook from her Miami high school. By then she was already a champion in national oratory competitions, sharpening the skills of rhetoric and cadence that are the stock and trade of ambitious lawyers. Her parents - an attorney and a school principal - saw their daughter's potential, and helped her to hoist herself from her middle-class origins onto the path followed by ambitious lawyers from more patrician backgrounds. She went to Harvard for undergrad and then to Harvard Law, eventually clerking on the court for Breyer himself - a justice known to be particularly picky with his clerkships.

She seems to have pursued the law with single-minded devotion since she was very young, committing herself to the profession with all the passion and devotion of a vocation.

Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist