Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson is eminently qualified for the United States Supreme Court.

The Supreme Court is heavy now with academics and court of appeals judges: what it misses is the eight years as a trial judge that Judge Jackson provides. The experience of seeing cases actually tried is especially important in criminal law. The academic and the court of appeals judge might have represented a criminal defendant in her or his private career; but the daily duty of a federal trial judge is dominated by criminal cases.

In deciding how to interpret laws and the Constitution, it is hugely valuable to our democratic republic that a Justice have actually seen the victims, witnesses, and defendants in criminal cases, in person, testifying before them. Admittedly, the work of a court of appeals judge is closer to the kind of work done by a Supreme Court justice, but both only read a cold record. Neither ever sees a witness, sentences a criminal, interrogates a probation officer, or listens to a plea from a victim’s family.  Their work is antiseptic. Judge Jackson’s experience brings red blooded life to the court.

When she is confirmed, she will join the liberal wing of the court. We have to accept that and not make it a rule in the Senate to oppose qualified nominees because they are liberal or conservative. A liberal Supreme Court nominee is the consequence of electing a liberal president. It is an ironic result, however, since, as a senator, Joe Biden did not afford the same tolerance for Judge Robert Bork, President Ronald Reagan’s nominee whom Biden had voted in favor of for the U.S. Court of Appeals, and whom Biden had said he would also support for the Supreme Court barring unanticipated results from background-checks. Sen. Biden then switched his view, becoming singularly responsible for turning Supreme Court nominations into political battles ever since. Bork was eminently qualified, and conservative. Jackson is eminently qualified, and liberal. Both should have been, and should be, confirmed.

The main area where Judge Jackson will show her liberal judicial philosophy is in construing “substantive due process.” That is the engine that has allowed previous Supreme Courts to establish a right to privacy, from which a woman’s right to choose an abortion, and a gay person’s right to same-sex marriage, have developed. Neither right is explicit in the Constitution. For conservatives, that fact ends the conversation. The judicial branch is the final interpreter of the U.S. Constitution because Chief Justice John Marshall so held in 1803.

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To interpret means to put meaning into words, however, not to make the words up entirely. For liberals, the guarantee that the government not deny any person of life, liberty, or property “without due process of law,” means that, even if a person is given a fair trial and all the Constitution’s procedural protections, certain conduct can never be made illegal. Conservatives also grant that — but insist on actual specifics in the Constitution for conduct to be protected in that way: such as the right to speak, or to possess a firearm.

Otherwise, conservatives worry, the most fundamental principles of our society will be decided not by the people’s elected representatives but by the judiciary. If abortion or gay rights are to be protected, conservatives argue, the right course is to amend the Constitution to do so — a process that requires two thirds of each house of Congress and three quarters of the states.  Hard as that process is, it has the beneficial result of expressing the overwhelming will of the people, and not going beyond that will. The right to privacy as found by the court, by contrast, can reach beyond a woman’s right to an abortion.

How can one argue privacy doesn’t include the right to end one’s own life, or the right to marry more than one person?  Judge Jackson may soon participate in answering just those questions.

Tom Campbell is a professor of law and of economics at Chapman University. He is in the process of forming a new party in California, the Common Sense Party.