Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett is out with a new book this week, Listening to the Law: Reflections on the Court and Constitution.
In its review, The New York Times pays the 53-year-old justice a compliment, suggesting the work “Is as careful and disciplined as its author,” but then goes on to describe the book as being “studiously bland.”
Yet one of the most interesting elements of books by members of the High Court usually stems from the interviews the justices grant in their effort to promote their projects. We regularly read their decisions and hear from them on the bench, but they’re historically tight-lipped and often outside the media spotlight. As a result, it’s easy to draw caricatures of the nine members that are often far removed from reality.
Justice Barrett is the first and only female member of the court with school-age children, and seven in all: Emma (22), Vivian (19), Tess (19), John Peter (16), Liam (14), Juliet (12), and Benjamin (11).
In a USA Today interview this past week, we see a real poignant and sentimental side of the 103rd associate justice. She talks about leaving Notre Dame Law School and South Bend, Ind., and especially the private life many take for granted. Justice Barrett describes standing out front of their house during a farewell party, hearing the children playing in the yard, longtime friends coming and going.
“I knew that I would never be able to feel as free with my friends and the people who I was interacting with,” she said. “The hardest thing for us to give up was just that freedom, the ease that you feel with friends you’ve had for a long time, and the freedom that you feel about having a life that’s outside of the public eye.”
Back in 2006, then Professor Barrett spoke to Notre Dame Law School graduates and reminded them that their “fundamental purpose in life is not to be a lawyer, but to know, love, and serve God.”
After being nominated by President Trump in 2020 and confirmed by the United States Senate, life went on for the Barretts in Washington, D.C., of course, only now with a security detail in tow. “My daughter doesn’t really enjoy being picked up from soccer practice in an armored vehicle,” she acknowledged.
Once upon a time, Supreme Court justices were able to walk unrecognized or unbothered out on the Mall during the lunch hour. Early in his tenure on the High Court, Justice Clarence Thomas was known to walk to morning Mass. Still, Justice Barrett works hard to maintain some degree of normalcy.
“I spend my days talking to law clerks about cases and writing and analyzing and reading, and then I leave and I’m on the sidelines of a soccer game or making a grocery run or serving lunch, volunteering at my children’s school,” she reflected.
Asked about how different life is at the Supreme Court or appeals court as compared to her career as a law professor, Justice Barrett pulled back the curtain.
“When you’re a law professor, sure, you’re giving people grades, you’re writing law review articles,” she said. “But when you are a judge, your decisions affect real people. If it’s a criminal case, it’s the liberty of someone. If it’s a capital case, it’s the life of someone.”
Does the burden of the work cause her to lose sleep?
“Sometimes I’m up at night because I’m trying to figure out the right answer, and they’re really hard, and it’s important to get it right,” she said. “Sometimes I’m up in the night because I’m working on an opinion, and it can be difficult to think about how to write the opinion and how to write it in the right way to keep a majority.”
Justice Barrett has brought to the High Court the sensibilities of not only a judge concerned with abiding by the Constitution, but also a wife and mother concerned with real-life challenges. During oral arguments this past January, Barrett pushed back on an attorney who suggested blocking or filtering content negated the need for age-verification software.
“Well, whoa, whoa, whoa,” Barrett said to the lawyer. “Content filtering for all those devices, I can say from personal experience, is difficult to keep up with,” she said. “I think that the explosion of addiction to online porn has shown that content filtering isn’t working.”
During the interview with USA Today, Justice Barrett disclosed that she saw Abigail Adams as a personal hero, and it’s easy to see why.
“She had many children and ran the farm, and she made money for the family because she was a shrewd investor,” Barrett said. “But she couldn’t do this (serve as a Supreme Court justice) because she didn’t have the rights and just because of the way the world was. But now our Constitution has changed and our society has changed in ways that the mother of school-aged children can serve on the Supreme Court.”
Like Barrett, Abigail Adams, wife to President John Adams, was a person of deep Christian faith. Wrote Adams, “He (or she) who neglects his duty to his Maker, may well be expected to be deficient and insincere in his duty towards the public.”
Justice Barrett’s life and testimony makes clear she has prioritized her devotion to the Lord in both word and deed.
Please join us in continuing to pray for Justice Amy Coney Barrett, her husband, Jesse, and their seven children.
Image from Getty.
