The Surprising Duality of a Supreme Court Justice

When Amy Coney Barrett was appointed to the Supreme Court, she was in some ways an unlikely choice. She was living in South Bend, Indiana, not New York or D.C. She went to Notre Dame Law School, making her the only justice that didn’t go to Harvard or Yale. She’s the mother of seven kids. And, at the time of her appointment, she’d largely spent her career as a professor, with just under three years on a federal appeals court.

To put it bluntly, Amy Coney Barrett was an outsider.

But people close to President Donald Trump saw something: She was an originalist. A former clerk for Antonin Scalia. A devout Catholic with real intellectual bona fides. And a rising star in the conservative legal movement. In short, she was the ideal jurist to replace the late Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

After her 2020 nomination, the left called her inexperienced and a religious zealot. They said her confirmation hearing was rushed, and that she would undermine trust in the Supreme Court.

But with a 52–48 vote, just six weeks before the 2020 presidential election, Barrett was confirmed—without one Democratic vote. She took her seat at the highest court at just 48 years old, and became only the fifth woman to ever serve on the Supreme Court.

Considering how our nation’s most powerful people stick around into their 80s, she’ll likely have a major impact on American law and life for decades to come.

We’re now five years into her time on the bench. And in a turn of events, CNN ran a piece last year titled “The Last Best Hope for Supreme Court Liberals: Amy Coney Barrett.” Newsweek ran “Amy Coney Barrett Is Liberal Justices’ ‘Best Chance’: SCOTUS Analyst ” and The New York Times ran “How Amy Coney Barrett Is Confounding the Right and the Left.”

How did we get from “dangerous, religious zealot” to “last best hope”?

On one hand, Barrett has done what one would expect of a Republican appointee: voting to overrule Roe v. Wade; voting to outlaw affirmative action; and voting against the administrative state.

At the same time, she has voted with liberal justices in some of the most pivotal cases—and in Trump-related cases, she is the member of the conservative supermajority who has sided in Trump’s favor the least. 

In short, Barrett surprises. She just wrote a new book called Listening to the Law: Reflections on the Court and Constitution, where she makes the simple but salient points: Her job is not to like all of her decisions, nor is it  to please the media or a president. It’s to follow the text of the Constitution, full stop. 

On Thursday night Bari sat down for a rare conversation with Justice Barrett at Lincoln Center’s Alice Tully Hall in New York City. 

Bari also asks her about key cases like Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the birthright citizenship case, nationwide injunctions, the shadow docket, transgender minors getting medical treatment, her willingness to dissent with liberal justices, her response to people who call her an “evil DEI hire,” and so much more.

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