Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson Must Be a Calvin and Hobbes Fan. She Referenced Calvinball In an ourt Opinion

Aug 23, 2025 07:18 PM EDT, Sat

Ketanji Brown Jackson accuses the Supreme Court of playing ‘Calvinball’ for Trump

The Biden appointee is alone again in calling out her high court colleagues.

Aug. 22, 2025, 2:57 PM EDT By Jordan Rubin

The newspaper comic strip “Calvin and Hobbes” had a fictional game called “Calvinball,” the rules of which are made up and constantly changing. The only fixed rule is that you can’t play it the same way twice.

The game appeared in a Supreme Court opinion Thursday, when Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson accused her colleagues of “Calvinball jurisprudence with a twist.”

In a solo opinion on the Trump administration’s quest to cut National Institutes of Health research grants, she wrote that in the court’s version of Calvinball, “this Administration always wins.”

Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson wrote that in the Supreme Court’s version of Calvinball, “this Administration always wins.”

It’s a remarkable statement from a sitting Supreme Court justice — she was clear to specify “this” administration — and not the first time that she has struck out on her own to publicly address her colleagues in stark terms.

Jackson is one of three Democratic appointees on the court, along with six Republican appointees. This was the latest example of Obama appointees Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan declining to sign on to some of Jackson’s strongest language. (All three Democratic appointees joined Chief Justice John Roberts’ opinion in the NIH matter, a case that produced a tangle of separate opinions, including Jackson’s.)

In her solo effort, Jackson described the NIH case as the “newest entry in the Court’s quest to make way for the Executive Branch.” She said it’s one that “has real consequences, for the law and for the public,” and she expressed the hope that “affected grant recipients can find a way to maintain their research studies — and their legal claims — long enough to give the Court the chance to change its mind.”

If the court changes course in the future and rules against the administration, that would seem to thwart Jackson’s Calvinball theory. But presumably she would be happy about that.

Calvin and Hobbes Playing Calvinball

In a broader sense, however, today’s ruling is of a piece with this Court’s recent tendencies. “[R]ight when the Judiciary should be hunkering down to do all it can to preserve the law’s constraints,” the Court opts instead to make vindicating the rule of law and preventing manifestly injurious Government action as difficult as possible. Id., at ___ (JACKSON, J., dissenting) (slip op., at 21). This is Calvinball jurisprudence with a twist. Calvinball has only one rule: There are no fixed rules.6 We seem to have two: that one, and this Administration always wins.7

6See Oxford English Dictionary (2025), https://www.oed.com/ dictionary/calvinball_n.

7 JUSTICE BARRETT’s separate opinion proves the point. It injects final agency action into the case as an additional potential barrier to relief, suggesting that the only challenge the order leaves open—the one to agency guidance—is in fact foreclosed by a doctrine the Government does not press. See ante, at 5–6; see also ante, at 4, n. 2 (opinion of GORSUCH, J.) (indicating that plaintiffs lack standing to pursue vacatur of the internal agency guidance).

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Jordan Rubin is the Deadline: Legal Blog writer. He was a prosecutor for the New York County District Attorney’s Office in Manhattan and is the author of “Bizarro,” a book about the secret war on synthetic drugs. Before he joined MSNBC, he was a legal reporter for Bloomberg Law.

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