When Ketanji Brown Jackson was nominated to the U.S. Supreme Court, she picked two people to introduce her to the Senate Judiciary Committee on the first day of her high-stakes hearing.

One was Jackson’s longtime friend and former Harvard roommate, Lisa Fairfax, now a law professor at the University of Pennsylvania. The other was Thomas Griffith, a former judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit.