Will Ketanji Brown Jackson attend the 2026 State of the Union Address?

Institutional norms often compel newer justices to attend the State of the Union (SOTU) to demonstrate judicial independence and respect for the separation of powers, regardless of the president's party. Justice Jackson attended President Biden's 2024 SOTU, establishing a baseline of participation. Unlike Justices Alito and Thomas, who have long-standing habits of non-attendance, Jackson is still in her first decade on the bench, a period when justices (like Kagan and Gorsuch) typically maintain high attendance rates. Her absence from the March 2025 Joint Session address might have been circumstantial rather than political. Fix the Court records show she had a speaking engagement at the ABA White Collar Crime Institute in Miami on March 6, 2025, just two days after the speech. If her 2025 absence was due to travel logistics for that specific event, she may return to the chamber for the 2026 address, especially since her known schedule places her near D.C. (Clinton, MD) on March 7, 2026, well after the February 24 speech.

The strongest predictor of future behavior is past behavior in similar contexts: Justice Jackson explicitly skipped President Trump's Joint Session address on March 4, 2025. This places her in the 'boycott' camp alongside Justices Sotomayor and Thomas, rather than the 'institutionalist' camp of Roberts and Kagan. It is rare for a justice to skip a president's first address (as she did in 2025) and then attend subsequent ones; typically, attendance declines over a presidency, it does not recover. Political signaling further supports a deliberate boycott. Jackson wore a necklace resembling Ruth Bader Ginsburg's 'dissent collar' to Trump's January 2025 inauguration and publicly criticized his 'relentless attacks' on the judiciary in May 2025. These actions suggest she is adopting a visible stance of resistance similar to the late Justice Ginsburg, who consistently skipped Trump's SOTU addresses. With the 2026 SOTU occurring amidst reported 'national unrest,' she is highly likely to avoid the event to prevent her presence from being interpreted as validation.