Since the start of her career, Justice Teri Jackson has been a pioneer. As an assistant district attorney, she launched San Francisco’s First Offender Prostitution Program, widely considered the nation’s first “john school” for first-time offenders charged with sex solicitation, and she forged new ground in elder abuse prosecutions. As a San Francisco Superior Court judge, she wrote case management orders that are now used across the state. And as a presiding justice on California’s court of appeal, she helped implement the state’s Judicial Mentor Program, which seeks to improve geographic, racial and gender representation on the bench by mentoring district judges and attorneys. 

Justice Jackson herself knows how daunting it is to be a trailblazer. She has frequently been the “first” over the course of her career— the first woman to head the homicide unit in the San Francisco prosecutor’s office, the first Black woman to serve on a San Francisco Superior Court, and the first Black woman to serve on the First Appellate District. On this month’s episode of Approach The Bench, Justice Jackson speaks with us about her storied career and how it’s influenced her to help other would-be judges.