U.S. Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett has a new memoir, set for release on Sept. 9, in which she discusses her views on faith and law and defends her decisions in some of the country’s most contentious modern legal issues, according to an excerpt shared with CNN.
The news outlet obtained an advanced copy of her new memoir, “Listening to the Law,” in which she apparently delves into how the court operates and why she stands by her decisions, including the overturning of the Supreme Court’s 1972 Roe v. Wade ruling that legalized abortion nationwide.
“(T)he Court’s role is to respect the choices that the people have agreed upon, not to tell them what they should agree to,” Barrett wrote, arguing that legalizing abortion “came at a cost.”
Barrett sided with the majority in the 6-3 majority decision to overturn Roe v. Wade in 2022, handing oversight of abortion back to the states. In her book she quotes Justice Samuel Alito’s opinion at the time, which stated that initially passing the law was an “exercise of raw judicial power."
“The evidence does not show that the American people have traditionally considered the right to obtain an abortion so fundamental to liberty that it ‘goes without saying’ in the Constitution,” she wrote, per CNN. “In fact, the evidence cuts in the opposite direction. Abortion not only lacked long-standing protection in American law — it had long been forbidden.”
The 1973 decision was “getting ahead of the American people,” she said. “Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, herself a supporter of abortion rights, observed nearly twenty years after Roe that the case may have ‘halted a political process that was moving in a reform direction,’ leading to ‘prolonged divisiveness,’ and a ‘deferred stable settlement of the issue.’”
How the court works
Barrett was President Donald Trump’s third appointee to the bench during his first term in office, after the death of Bader Ginsburg. She sealed the conservative majority in the Supreme Court, though her decisions have developed a reputation for being less predictable than many expected when she was confirmed in 2020.
Prior to her appointment on the country’s highest court, she served as a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit, and before that she was a professor of law at the University of Notre Dame.
In her book, she explains frustrations she previously had with the Supreme Court’s sometimes ambiguous opinions.
“Before I joined the Court, I was sometimes frustrated by an opinion’s cryptic language or its failure to resolve fairly obvious points,” she writes in her book, per CNN. “Now I better appreciate that glossing over issues is often deliberate.”
Part of the reason is that she finds that if more justices agree with the bottom line of an issue, it’s better to be broad and agreeable than narrow and disagreeable.
“Skirting issues is sometimes the price of finding common ground — though it’s frustrating to delete points I’d like to make.”
“The best days are when ‘join’ memos come in quickly and without requests for changes,” Barrett writes, recounting, “Once, when other justices quickly joined a particularly tricky opinion of mine, my chambers celebrated with an impromptu bottle of champagne. More often, there are at least a few requested edits — some simple and others requiring significant work. The latter requests are not an occasion for champagne, because after the effort of producing the opinion, reworking it is painful.”
Her religious convictions
In 2017, during her confirmation hearing for the court of appeals, Barrett was questioned on whether or not she could separate her religious beliefs as a Catholic from her decisions as a judge.
“Dogma and law are two different things, and I think whatever a religion is, it has its own dogma; the law is totally different,” former Democratic Sen. Dianne Feinstein said to Barrett during the judiciary committee hearing. “When you read your speeches, the conclusion one draws is that the dogma lives loudly within you, and that’s of concern when you come to big issues that large numbers of people have fought for years in this country.”
Barrett responded that she saw no issue with having strong religious beliefs and being a judge, and that if it came down to her having a conscientious objection to the law, she would recuse herself.
In her book, she reflected on the criticism she’s faced as a person of faith in her profession.
“Some suggest that people of faith have a particularly difficult time following the law rather than their moral views. (I faced that criticism as a Catholic, most sharply when the Senate Judiciary Committee conducted a hearing to consider my nomination to the Seventh Circuit.) I’m not sure why.”
“Fortunately for the health of our country,” Barrett added, “people of faith are not the only Americans with firm convictions about right and wrong. Nonreligious judges also have deeply held moral commitments, which means that they too face conflicts between those commitments and the demands of the law.”