If Harvard Law School grads were paying attention to Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson's testimony in responding to Sen. Marsha Blackburn's simple but revealing question on defining "woman," they would petition the provost to rescind her diploma.

Judge Jackson purports not to know what a woman is: "I'm not a biologist."  Thus, Judge Jackson would have to recuse herself from any court case involving human biology, sex and gender, equal protection, even women's right to vote.

The corollary fits Judge Jackson's competence in applying jurisprudence where she is not credentialed in any subject matter.  For example, she's not an agronomist or a hydrologist or a botanist or a bio-chemist, so she couldn't sit on a case involving the EPA and soil erosion, nitrous oxide leaching into water supplies, SuperFund sites, navigable waterways, or ethanol Renewable Fuel Standards.

Judge Jackson isn't a civil engineer or a property appraiser and thus couldn't opine on eminent domain cases.  She isn't a physicist or a meteorologist and thus couldn't participate in any atmospheric CO2 or climate change litigation.  And because she isn't a nuclear physicist or a geologist, she couldn't sit on cases involving interstate shipment and storage of nuclear reactor waste.

She's not a Latin scholar, and thus, she couldn't possibly have an opinion on stare decisis, habeas corpus, or mandamus

Usually, graduates of Harvard Law School display abundant omniscience.

But not Judge Jackson.  Her retreat from admitting having any knowledge at all is a disgrace to armchair epistemologists everywhere. 

And so, is Judge Jackson suffering from a crippling excess of humility?  Or is she just an idiot?

I'm neither a lexicographer nor a psychotherapist.  But I know the answer, and so do you.

Image: HR2rty, via Wikimedia Commons (cropped), CC BY-SA 4.0.