There are very few people who know how President Biden’s pick for the next Supreme Court Justice, Ketanji Brown Jackson, is feeling as she awaits confirmation.

Especially with her nomination to the highest courts as the first African American woman to be nominated to the highest court being so historic.

Florida’s first African American female Supreme Court Justice, Peggy Quince, said she has an idea of how Judge Jackson must be feeling right now.

“You’re thinking about how I’m going to fit with my colleagues. How I’m going to make, you know we all have to make the first move to make sure that everyone is comfortable,” Quince said. “You’re also wondering what the case load is like. How do you get assignments of cases? There are all kinds of little things that the public probably never even thinks about. All they hear really is the result.”

From her appointment in 1999 until her retirement in 2019, Justice Quince says she never forgot how important her role serving on the state’s highest court was.

“You know what you really say to yourself is 'I am doing this not just for me but I am doing it for all of those young people who are coming up.' Whether they be in elementary or high school, or college or even law school. I’m doing this also for them because they know from this, this appointment, from my sitting on the Supreme Court of Appeals, for my sitting on the Florida Supreme Court that it is possible. And so if that is something you want to dream, dream it,” she said.

Quince said being Black in America in the 60’s inspired her to pursue a legal career instead of a career in medicine like she had planned.

“I was in school during 60’s, early 70’s. it was a lot of things going on in our country, You know we had the Vietnam War going on and all the protests about Vietnam. We had the student sit-ins in the administration buildings. We had the murdered students at Kent State. All of those things were going on when I was in undergraduate school and it made me interested in the law,” she said. “So I decided to go to law school instead of medical school.”

She quickly learned discrimination didn’t stop with a law degree. “Years ago, even the Black lawyers could not go to the well and approach the court without the court telling them to, they would be standing behind and only if the judge allowed them to come forward, could they come forward,” she said. “If I’m the client and my lawyer cannot even approach the judge, how do you think I would feel?”

Quince said that’s why her appointment to the Florida Supreme Court was so important then and it still is now. She’s confident nominations like Judge Jackson will happen more often thanks to these history making moments.

“That’s the beauty of diversity because we are faced at every level of our court system with multiple issues and we bring, each ethnic group, each racial group, no matter what you gender preference is, we all bring something different to the court system and we need all of those differences because our population is different,” she said.