Melissa Jackson

Melissa Carow Jackson (born 1952) is an American jurist and lawyer.

Jackson was born and raised in New York City. She is the daughter of William Eldred Jackson and Nancy Dabney Roosevelt. Her father was the son of Robert Houghwout Jackson, Associate Justice of the United States Supreme Court, United States Attorney General, and the chief United States prosecutor at the Nuremberg trials. Her mother was the daughter of Archibald Roosevelt, son of President Theodore Roosevelt and Edith Kermit Carow. Her sister is Melanie Jackson, a literary agent married to author Thomas Pynchon.

She received her Bachelor of Arts, cum laude, from the University of Pennsylvania in 1974 and her Juris Doctor in 1980 from Fordham University School of Law. For 22 years she worked as an Assistant District Attorney for Kings County, New York. In 2003, New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg appointed her to the New York City Criminal Court, and in 2007 her appointment to the Criminal Court bench was extended for another ten-year term. In 2008, she was appointed Acting Supreme Court Justice for New York County and Supervising Judge of the New York County Criminal Court.

Jackson has received attention presiding over cases involving singer Courtney Love, actress Rosario Dawson, basketball player Jayson Williams, and rapper Foxy Brown. Jackson received international visibility when she presided over the highly publicized initial bail hearing of International Monetary Fund managing director Dominique Strauss-Kahn, who was being held for allegedly sexually assaulting a maid in his suite at the Sofitel New York Hotel in Manhattan. On May 16, 2011 Jackson denied Strauss-Kahn's request for release on $1 million bail on the ground that he was a flight risk, saying the fact that Strauss-Kahn was apprehended on an airplane "raised some concerns".

Jackson is married to William James Morgan, and is the mother of three children.