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Amy Coney Barrett

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Barrett in a judicial robe
Amy Coney Barrett in 2018

Amy Coney Barrett (born 1972 Amy Vivian Coney) is an American lawyer, jurist, and former academic who serves as an associate justice of the Supreme Court of the United States. She was a United States Circuit Judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit, and was on Donald Trump's short list for Supreme Court picks.

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Quotes about Coney Barrett

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  • But fate- and McConnell- had one more card to play. In September 2020, as Trump was sputtering toward a reelection defeat, Justice Ginsburg lost her long battle with cancer. Having rejected calls to retire when Obama would have been the one to name a replacement, the ailing Ginsburg fought to stay alive long enough for a Democratic president to choose her successor. She died within forty-six days of the election.
    This time, McConnell vowed to move to confirmation with alacrity. Trump nominated Seventh Circuit Court Judge Amy Coney Barrett, a longtime favorite of the conservative legal movement. Beyond her status as the first Republican woman nominated to the Court, she differed from the recent male GOP nominees in a few noteworthy ways. She had steered clear of the Ivy League, attending tiny Rhodes College and Notre Dame Law School before clerking for Scalia. But she, like the male nominees who preceded her, grew up in a devoutly Catholic family and became a circuit judge at an early age. She was also a member of the Federalist Society.
    • Peter S. Canellos, Revenge for the Sixties: Samuel Alito and the Triumph of the Conservative Legal Movement (2026), New York: Simon & Schuster first hardcover edition, p. 209-210
  • Democrats boycotted the Judiciary Committee's vote on her nomination in protest of McConnell's rush to confirm her before the election. They found his actions particularly disingenuous because of his refusal to allow a hearing on Garland's nomination in the eight months before the previous election. But Republicans had the votes- barely. Barrett was confirmed by 52-48, with all Democrats voting no in anger over McConnell. Eight days later, Trump lost the election and Republicans lost the Senate. But the Supreme Court was now prepared to shape the law in all the ways that Ed Meese and his minions had only imagined three decades earlier.
    • Peter S. Canellos, Revenge for the Sixties (2026), New York: Simon & Schuster first hardcover edition, p. 210
  • Dogma and law are two different things, and I think whatever a religion is, it has its own dogma. The law is totally different. And I think in your case, professor, when you read your speeches, the conclusion one draws is that the dogma lives loudly within you, and that’s of concern.
  • Criticism comes, rightly, with the territory of being a Supreme Court justice. Hysteria shouldn’t.
    With the conclusion of the 2025–26 Supreme Court term and Donald Trump’s defeat on birthright citizenship, we have been treated to another round of abuse from right-leaning commentators directed toward Justice Amy Coney Barrett. The immediate trigger of their ire is Barrett’s joining the Trump v. Barbara majority (along with Chief Justice John Roberts and, on the outcome, Justice Brett Kavanaugh) striking down Trump’s executive order on birthright citizenship. Barrett critics also cite her majority opinion in Watson v. Republican National Committee, which allowed states to accept ballots postmarked by Election Day for up to five days later, as well as her vote (along with Roberts and Justice Neil Gorsuch) to strike down Trump’s “emergency” global tariffs and her rulings against Trump in a few of last summer’s torrent of emergency decisions on deportations.
    It’s the intemperate vitriol of these attacks, and their utter lack of perspective, that appalls us. Critics brand Barrett a traitor, a DEI hire, and a left-winger who has doomed the country. They complain that she makes poor decisions because she is a woman and a mother of adopted children from Haiti. Perhaps more ominously, there is much muttering that future Republicans should fill judicial vacancies with fewer people devoted to the law and more who will be mere party apparatchiks, voting in the results-oriented fashion we traditionally associate with the liberal justices.
  • Leaving aside the indecency of some of the critics, we object on two grounds. First, the predictable, faithful rule of written law is a positive end in itself, and a pillar of the good society. If judges are to be loyal to a party or impose their own preferred ends, they may as well be elected, and most of their powers given over to the other branches. Instead, we expect them to apply as best they can the work of the people’s representatives who made the Constitution and make the laws. That this sometimes puts them at odds with the best results reflects on the lawmakers, not the courts. That this sometimes puts them at odds with political leaders and popular opinion is a relief to anyone who might someday find themselves in the crosshairs of either and will need to stand upon the guarantees of law.
    Second, Barrett is an outstanding justice and a key contributor to an outstanding Court. No, we don’t always agree with her, or with the Court’s decisions since her arrival in 2020 formed the current 6–3 majority. Nor, for that matter, do we agree every single time with any of her distinguished colleagues. The Court’s cases are often hard, and its justices fallible. That’s why there are nine of them.
    The quality of her work shames any suggestion that Barrett makes decisions from emotion or from cowardice. Perfect Olympian impartiality is impossible for even the greatest of jurists, but Barrett’s opinions, and her questions at argument, consistently show the same thorough diligence, even temper, and stickling for detail and proper procedure that characterized her long career as an academic. The only occasions when she has flashed any emotion have been in pointed debates with Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson over questions of methodology and consistency in the majority’s approach. If there is a fair critique of Barrett, it might be that she’s occasionally too devoted to process, especially on issues of standing to sue — but that is by far a lesser sin than its opposite. We wish one could say of her critics that they suffered from too much equanimity and concern for the law.
  • Far more often than not, Barrett has stood courageously with her colleagues in one landmark conservative victory after another: overturning Roe v. Wade amidst threats to the justices’ safety, fortifying the Second Amendment, ending racial preferences, rejecting transgender ideology, protecting religious liberty, expanding space for school choice, reining in the administrative state, closing down avenues to attack secure elections, restricting nationwide injunctions by rogue district judges, swatting down lawfare that sought to jail Trump and throw him off the ballot, and blocking one after another of Joe Biden’s overreaches. This term has been no different, with Barrett joining decisions ending racially gerrymandered districts, allowing Trump to fire agency heads at will, protecting girls’ sports from male transgender athletes, and defending the religious free speech of crisis pregnancy centers and counselors against gender transition. We are almost, but not quite, sick of all the winning. When Roberts and Kavanaugh voted with the liberals to create extra-constitutional protections from Trump for the Federal Reserve, Barrett dissented.
  • The birthright citizenship case was a hard one; both sides had serious arguments on birth tourism, but the dissenters were not of one voice on what the standard should be, and none of them offered a serious defense of the administration’s position on the children of illegal aliens. Watson was disappointing, but it left open challenges to votes not provably cast by Election Day, and Barrett’s argument was a plausible reading of federal law and respected the primacy of states in regulating elections. In the tariff case, she was clearly in the right, and the president in the wrong. We could say something similar about most of her controversial decisions in five and a half years on the Court.
    A good justice will never please everyone. But our advice would be to tune out the intemperate critics, because trying to appease them will only make things worse. Fortunately, that seems to be Barrett’s approach. Keep up the good work.
  • The Supreme Court constitutes a third pillar of minority rule. The court's partisan bias is indirect but nevertheless is consequential. Given the nature of the Electoral College and the Senate, Supreme Court justices may be nominated by presidents who lost the popular vote and confirmed by Senate majorities that represent only a minority of Americans. And given the Republican advantage in the Electoral College and the Senate, such justices are far more likely to be Republican appointees.
    This has certainly been the case in the twenty-first century. Four of nine current Supreme Court justices- Clarence Thomas, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett- were confirmed by a Senate majority that collectively won a minority of the popular vote in Senate elections and represented less than half of the American population. And three of them- Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, and Coney Barrett- were also nominated by a president who lost the popular vote. Had majorities prevailed in presidential and Senate elections, then, three- and possibly four- of the Supreme Court's most conservative justices would not be on the court. In all likelihood, three of these seats would have been filled by Democratic appointees.
    Thanks to the growing divergence between electoral majorities and the composition of the Supreme Court, Americans have a court that is increasingly- and often glaringly- at odds with public opinion. Historically, scholars of the Supreme Court argue, justices have tempered their decisions to avoid straying too far from the people's will. That appears to be no longer the case. Recent research has found a growing gap between Supreme Court rulings and majority public opinion in the United States. This trend is no accident: the court's conservative majority was imposed by a partisan minority.
    • Steven Levitsky & Daniel Ziblatt, Tyranny of the Minority: Why American Democracy Reached the Breaking Point (2023), New York: Crown, hardcover first edition, p. 176-177
  • Eighty-eight faculty members at the University of Notre Dame have penned an open letter to colleague and Supreme Court nominee Amy Coney Barrett, asking her to halt the confirmation process until after the presidential election. The group — which does not include any instructors at Notre Dame Law School, where Barrett, 48, teaches — called on her to “take this unprecedented step” in light of three considerations...
    Your nomination comes at a treacherous moment in the United States. Our politics are consumed by polarization, mistrust, and fevered conspiracy theories... You have the opportunity to offer an alternative to all that by demanding that your nomination be suspended until after the election.... We’re asking a lot, we know. Should Vice-President Biden be elected, your seat on the court will almost certainly be lost. That would be painful, surely. Yet there is much to be gained in risking your seat. You would earn the respect of fair-minded people everywhere. You would provide a model of civic selflessness. And you might well inspire Americans of different beliefs toward a renewed commitment to the common good.
  • In the rush of major rulings that the justices handed down at the end of June, Barrett joined two 5-4 decisions that ruled against Trump and his Republican Party. And not just on any issues, but two that have become increasingly central to the MAGA-era right: elections and immigration.
    For many Supreme Court experts, the biggest surprise in both cases is that the vote was so close. In Watson v. Republican National Committee (2026), Republicans challenged a Mississippi law that allowed ballots that are mailed before Election Day, but that arrive up to five days later, to be counted — despite the fact that states have counted late-arriving ballots since the Civil War. And, in Trump v. Barbara (2026), Barrett also rejected Trump’s argument that a constitutional provision, that makes most people born in the United States citizens, has been misread by the Supreme Court for nearly 130 years.
    But these decisions sparked angry responses from many of Trump’s allies, who had built up the ballot case into a bulwark against nonexistent election fraud touted by the president and the birthright citizenship case into a last stand against often-conspiratorial fears of an immigration “invasion.”
  • Similarly, the birthright citizenship question at the heart of Barbara was one of the most uncontroversial questions in US law until Trump attempted to abolish birthright citizenship in 2025. When Judge John Coughenour, the Reagan appointee who was the first judge to reject Trump’s attack on birthright citizenship, announced his decision, he declared that he’s “been on the bench for over four decades,” and he “can’t remember another case where the question presented is as clear as this one is.” Yet, whatever can be said about the GOP’s views in 2020, when Barrett was appointed, Barrett’s views on election law and citizenship are now wildly out of step with an ascendant faction within the Republican Party. Vice President JD Vance labeled birthright citizenship the “dumbest immigration policy in the world.” That’s one reason to keep an eye on the MAGA backlash against Barrett. Future Republican White Houses are more likely to vet any judicial nominee very closely to make sure that they will vote to abolish birthright citizenship, regardless of what the Constitution says.
  • When she was asked about a newspaper ad she signed criticizing Roe v Wade, first reported by the Guardian, Barrett said she had “no recollection” of it and stressed she had nothing to hide... Most of the Democrats’ questioning centered on the ACA (Affordable Care Act), and how a ruling by the high court overturning the law would take healthcare away from millions of Americans... Barrett said she was not hostile to the ACA, abortion or gay rights, another area worrying progressives as the court seems set to tilt to a 6-3 conservative majority.
    She repeatedly denied any indication that her political views would color her rulings on the high court. (Kamala) Harris at one point asked Barrett if she had heard Trump’s vows to seat a supreme court justice who would overturn Roe v Wade and the ACA. Harris also pointed out that Trump nominated Barrett to serve as an appellate judge seven months after Barrett penned an article criticizing Justice John Roberts’ ruling upholding the ACA. Harris argued that showed Trump had been elevating Barrett to overturn the healthcare law.
  • Barrett, in addition to serving as an appellate judge, is also a professor at the University of Notre Dame. Almost 100 of Barrett’s colleagues in a letter urged her to hold off on the confirmation process until after the presidential election in November.... “You are not, of course, responsible for the anti-democratic machinations driving your nomination,” the letter added.

See also

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