Biden's high court choice defies expectations on labor cases

DETROIT (AP) — Labor unions and worker advocates have applauded President Joe Biden’s nomination of Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson for the Supreme Court. Yet a look back at Jackson's decisions in cases involving business and labor suggest that she won’t always rule as they want or expect her to.

Though Jackson is widely seen as a liberal on social and economic issues and as a defender of workers’ rights, her decisions, as a federal district court judge and then as a federal appellate judge since last year, defy easy categorization.

“She’s as likely to rule for a corporation in a race discrimination claim as she is for the plaintiff,” said Ted Ruger, dean of the University of Pennsylvania Law School, who served with Jackson on the Harvard Law Review during law school. “Like any judge who follows the law and listens to the evidence in the case, she may disappoint some who always want a predictably liberal outcome.”

Out of 40 employment and business-related rulings reviewed by The Associated Press, Jackson ruled for the defendants 30 times since 2013 while serving as a judge on the U.S. District Court in Washington. Many of the cases involved discrimination claims that employees had filed against government agencies. And they hinged largely on interpretations of arcane provisions of employment laws.

In one of her private-sector cases, Jackson ruled that a Lyft ride-sharing driver had agreed to the company's terms of service when she signed up with the company, and therefore had to pursue arbitration to settle a dispute, rather than a class-action lawsuit. The driver had claimed that she and others were Lyft employees who were protected by a law in the District of Columbia that entitled them to paid sick leave.

In the view of Ruger, Jackson tends to closely follow...