On Tuesday, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson again proved that she didn’t know what a woman was. That was par for the course.
Of more considerable interest: She also apparently doesn’t know what a simple legal term was, either.
If there was ever a case on which Ketanji Brown Jackson was going to humiliate herself this Supreme Court term, it was going to be Little v. Hecox. That’s the case challenging Idaho legislation which will determine whether states have a right to enact laws that prohibit boys who identify as transgender from competing in girls sports at the school level.
After all, this was the moment we all remember from Jackson’s confirmation hearing in 2022, when she was set to replace the retiring Stephen Breyer:
SEN. BLACKBURN: “Can you provide a definition of the word ‘woman’?”
JACKSON: “No, I can’t”
BLACKBURN: “You can’t?”
JACKSON: “I’m not a biologist” pic.twitter.com/i7Rg83z5Y4
— RNC Research (@RNCResearch) March 23, 2022
That provided us with an endless amount of laughter, and Matt Walsh with a documentary title. While the documentary titles haven’t kept dropping, the hilarity has, such as when Justice Jackson appealed to the judgment of a hypothetical Martian in her dissent in a case involving universal injunctions:
An underappreciated passage of Justice Jackson’s dissent in CASA is her appeal to the authority of a fictional space alien. pic.twitter.com/IEzqHgIn7j
— James Taranto (@jamestaranto) June 28, 2025
One would have expected these two tendencies to intersect and create a few viral moments. And to be fair, there were some. But KBJ being KBJ, the most hilarious part of the oral arguments in Little v. Hecox Tuesday was having to be reminded what tailoring a law means.
One of the arguments being made by Hashim Mooppan, arguing on behalf of the United States in an amicus curiae manner supporting Idaho, had laid out in his opening statements that Idaho’s “law is reasonably tailored, regardless of whether it is perfectly tailored, as applied to any such tiny subset of men. And states are not required to redefine sex or monitor the testosterone levels of female athletes.”
“Tailoring,” in constitutional law, is effectively making the law broad or narrow depending on the level of scrutiny a law is subject to under judicial review. A law subject to the “strict scrutiny” standard, which involves a fundamental constitutional right, might have a greater need to be perfectly tailored than a law that does not fall under the purview of a bedrock constitutional right.
There, I explained to you what a Supreme Court justice did not learn in decades of schooling and work from the bench.
Just before Justice Jackson began her questioning, Mooppan and Justice Amy Coney Barrett were talking about how intermediate, not strict, scrutiny was a “reasonable fit” for Idaho’s law, considering there was no inherent constitutional right to compete in a sport involved. Jackson began by posing this question to Mooppan: “I guess I’m still struggling to understand why the state would have to have perfectly tailored laws.
“I would think the state would just have to make exceptions where people can demonstrate that the justification that makes the state’s conduct constitutional doesn’t apply to them,” she added.
Erm.
“So making exceptions is tailoring your law,” Mooppan responded. “That’s literally what it means, to tailor your law.”
National Review legal analyst Dan McLaughlin noted what a naked embarrassment this was:
You gotta be pretty bad as a Justice to get schooled this hard by a lawyer arguing in front of you pic.twitter.com/p7csCQSTb2
— Dan McLaughlin (@baseballcrank) January 13, 2026
Oh yeah, and there was other gender-related fun to be had, too:
Ketanji Brown-Jackson: “We are now looking at the definition of a girl and we’re saying only people who were girl-assigned at birth qualify.”
Uhhh yes. pic.twitter.com/bm4U4byxPw
— Greg Price (@greg_price11) January 13, 2026
Ketanji Brown-Jackson: “Cis-gender girls can play consistent with their gender identity. For transgender girls, they can’t?!”
Four years later and it seems KBJ still hasn’t learned what a woman is.pic.twitter.com/54lIpfHnj8
— CJ Pearson (@Cjpearson) January 13, 2026
But primarily, where we thought KBJ would zig, she zagged. Instead of providing the lulz with her “I’m not a biologist” schtick, she instead went the “I’m not a legal expert” direction.
Ten times funnier. A hundred times scarier.
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