Amy Coney Barrett
Amy Vivian Coney Barrett is an American lawyer and jurist serving since 2020 as an associate justice of the Supreme Court of the United States. The fifth woman to serve on the court, she was nominated by President Donald Trump. She was a U.S. circuit judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit from 2017 to 2020.
Barrett graduated from Rhodes College before attending Notre Dame Law School, earning a Juris Doctor degree in 1997 and ranked first in her class. She then clerked for Judge Laurence Silberman and Justice Antonin Scalia. In 2002, Barrett joined the faculty at Notre Dame Law School, becoming a professor in 2010. While a circuit judge, she continued to teach civil procedure, constitutional law, and statutory interpretation.
On September 26, 2020, shortly after U.S. Supreme Court justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg's death, Trump nominated Barrett to succeed her. Her nomination was controversial because the 2020 presidential election was only 38 days away and Senate Republicans had refused to hold hearings for Merrick Garland during an election year in 2016. The next month, the U.S. Senate voted 52–48 to confirm her nomination, with all Democrats and one Republican in opposition.
Described as a protégée of Justice Antonin Scalia, Barrett supports textualism in statutory interpretation and originalism in constitutional interpretation. While generally considered to be among the Court's conservative bloc, Barrett has demonstrated a growing pattern of independence and moderation as a swing vote in some controversial cases.
Early life and education
Amy Vivian Coney was born in 1972 in New Orleans, Louisiana, to Linda and Michael Coney. The eldest of seven children, she has five sisters and a brother. Her father worked as an attorney for Shell Oil Company, and her mother was a high school French teacher and homemaker. Barrett has Irish and French ancestry. Her maternal ancestors were from Ballyconnell, County Cavan, Ireland, while there is also Irish lineage among her father's ancestors. Her great-great-grandparents emigrated from France to New Orleans. Her family is devoutly Catholic, and her father is an ordained deacon at St. Catherine of Siena Parish in Metairie, Louisiana, where she grew up. Barrett attended St. Mary's Dominican High School, an all-girls Roman Catholic high school in New Orleans. She was student body vice president of the school and graduated in 1990.After high school, Barrett attended Rhodes College in Memphis, Tennessee, where she majored in English literature and minored in French. She considers herself "somewhat fluent" in French, but with a Louisiana accent. She graduated in 1994 with a Bachelor of Arts, magna cum laude, and was inducted into Omicron Delta Kappa and Phi Beta Kappa. In her graduating class, she was named the most outstanding English department graduate. Barrett then attended Notre Dame Law School on a full-tuition scholarship. She was an executive editor of the Notre Dame Law Review and graduated in 1997 with a Juris Doctor, summa cum laude, ranked first in her class.
Legal career
Clerkships and private practice
Barrett spent two years as a judicial law clerk after law school, first for Judge Laurence Silberman of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit from 1997 to 1998, and then for Justice Antonin Scalia of the U.S. Supreme Court from 1998 to 1999.From 1999 to 2002, Barrett practiced law at Miller Cassidy Larroca & Lewin, a boutique law firm for litigation in Washington, D.C., that merged with the Houston, Texas-based law firm Baker Botts in 2001. While at Baker Botts, she worked on Bush v. Gore, the lawsuit that grew out of the 2000 United States presidential election, providing research and briefing assistance for the firm's representation of George W. Bush.
Teaching and scholarship
In 2001, Barrett was a visiting associate professor and John M. Olin Fellow in Law at George Washington University Law School. In 2002, she joined the faculty of her alma mater, Notre Dame Law School. At Notre Dame, she taught federal courts, evidence, constitutional law, and statutory interpretation. In 2007, she was a visiting professor at the University of Virginia School of Law. Barrett was named a professor of law at Notre Dame in 2010, and from 2014 to 2017 held Notre Dame's Diane and M.O. Miller II Research Chair of Law. Her scholarship focused on constitutional law, originalism, statutory interpretation, and stare decisis. Her academic work has been published in the Columbia, Cornell, Virginia, Notre Dame Law Review, and Texas law reviews.At Notre Dame, Barrett received the "Distinguished Professor of the Year" award three times. From 2011 to 2016, she spoke on constitutional law at Blackstone Legal Fellowship, a summer program for law school students that the Alliance Defending Freedom established to inspire a "distinctly Christian worldview in every area of law". While serving on the Seventh Circuit, Barrett commuted between Chicago and South Bend, continuing to teach courses on statutory interpretation and constitutional theory.
In 2010, Chief Justice John Roberts appointed Barrett to serve on the Advisory Committee for the Federal Rules of Appellate Procedure.
Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals (2017–2020)
Nomination and confirmation
On May 8, 2017, President Donald Trump nominated Barrett to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit—the federal appellate court covering Illinois, Indiana, and Wisconsin—after Judge John Daniel Tinder took senior status. A Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on her nomination was held on September 6, 2017. During the hearing, Senator Dianne Feinstein questioned Barrett about a law review article Barrett co-wrote in 1998 with Professor John H. Garvey in which they argued that Catholic judges should in some cases recuse themselves from death penalty cases due to their moral objections to the death penalty. Asked to "elaborate on the statements and discuss how you view the issue of faith versus fulfilling the responsibility as a judge today," Barrett said that she had participated in many death-penalty appeals while serving as law clerk to Scalia, adding, "My personal church affiliation or my religious belief would not bear on the discharge of my duties as a judge" and "It is never appropriate for a judge to impose that judge's personal convictions, whether they arise from faith or anywhere else, on the law." Barrett emphasized that the article was written in her third year in law school and that she was "very much the junior partner in our collaboration." Worried that Barrett would not uphold Roe v. Wade given her Catholic beliefs, Feinstein followed Barrett's response by saying, "the dogma lives loudly within you, and that is a concern."The hearing made Barrett popular with religious conservatives. Feinstein's and other senators' questioning was criticized by some Republicans and other observers, such as university presidents John I. Jenkins of the University of Notre Dame and Christopher Eisgruber of Princeton, as an improper inquiry into a nominee's religious belief that employed an unconstitutional "religious test" for office; others, such as Nan Aron, defended Feinstein's line of questioning.
File:20180223 185543 NDD 5533.jpg|thumb|Judge Laurence Silberman, for whom Barrett first clerked after law school, swearing her in at her investiture for the Seventh Circuit in 2018|alt=
Lambda Legal, an LGBT civil rights organization, co-signed a letter with 26 other gay rights organizations opposing Barrett's nomination. The letter expressed doubts about her ability to separate faith from her rulings on LGBT matters. During her Senate hearing, Barrett was questioned about landmark LGBTQ legal precedents such as Obergefell v. Hodges, United States v. Windsor, and Lawrence v. Texas. She said these cases are "binding precedents" that she intended to "faithfully follow if confirmed" to the appeals court, as required by law. The letter Lambda Legal co-signed read, "Simply repeating that she would be bound by Supreme Court precedent does not illuminate—indeed, it obfuscates—how Professor Barrett would interpret and apply precedent when faced with the sorts of dilemmas that, in her view, 'put Catholic judges in a bind.'"
Barrett's nomination was supported by every law clerk she had worked with and all of her 49 faculty colleagues at Notre Dame Law school. 450 former students signed a letter to the Senate Judiciary Committee supporting her nomination.
On October 5, 2017, the Senate Judiciary Committee voted 11–9 on party lines to recommend Barrett and report her nomination to the full Senate. On October 30, the Senate invoked cloture by a vote of 54–42. It confirmed her by a vote of 55–43 on October 31, with three Democrats—Joe Donnelly, Tim Kaine, and Joe Manchin—voting for her. She received her commission two days later. Barrett is the first woman to occupy an Indiana seat on the Seventh Circuit.