Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson is having trouble getting sleep.
During a Q&A session at the Indianapolis Bar Association on Thursday, moderator and U.S. District Judge Jane Magnus-Stinson asked Jackson what keeps her up at night.
“I would say the state of our democracy,” Jackson replied before the crowd burst into applause, according to The New York Times.
“I am really very interested in getting people to focus and to invest and to pay attention to what is happening in our country and in our government,” she added.
Jackson, an appointee of former President Joe Biden, has issued a series of pointed dissents over the Court’s previous term, lambasting her conservative colleagues on rulings having to do with everything from executive power to immigrant rights. Earlier this week, she was the lone dissenter in an 8-1 decision that cleared the way for mass layoffs within the federal bureaucracy.
In her opinion in that case, Jackson warned that the majority would unleash a “wrecking ball” on the government and disparaged the conservative majority’s ruling as “hubristic and senseless.”
At times, Jackson’s sharply worded opinions have been met with rebukes of their own.
In Trump v. CASA, a case that limited the ability of lower court judges to issue nationwide injunctions against the federal government’s policies, Justice Amy Coney Barrett wrote in her opinion that Jackson’s dissent was unmoored from “any doctrine whatsoever.”
Jackson was no less pointed in her response, which she said wrote with “deep disillusionment.
“This court’s complicity in the creation of a culture of disdain for lower courts, their rulings, and the law (as they interpret it) will surely hasten the downfall of our governing institutions, enabling our collective demise,” she wrote.
With an NPR poll released earlier this month finding that 76 percent of Americans think that democracy is under threat, she’s not the only one losing sleep.
