On Friday afternoon, Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett returned to her alma mater, speaking at DeBartolo Performing Arts Center, as part of a media tour promoting her new book “Listening to the Law.” During the roughly 45-minute-long discussion, moderated by professor Vincent Philip Muñoz, the director of the Center for Citizenship and Constitutional Government, Barrett discussed her faith, her life on the Supreme Court, the judicial doctrine of originalism and her time at Notre Dame Law School, where she earned her Juris Doctor in 1997.
The event began on a somber note with remarks by University President Fr. Robert Dowd noting the recent assassination of conservative political activist and organizer Charlie Kirk, as well as recent mass shootings at schools in Minnesota and Colorado. Dowd led a prayer, urging the audience and the country to engage in dialogue across differences.
“We’re all shocked and dismayed by this terrible violence and it’s good for us as members of the Notre Dame community to come together and rededicate ourselves to respect and dialogue across differences, and to rededicate ourselves to being peacemakers and peace builders,” Dowd said.
Following Dowd’s invocation, Muñoz spoke, also mentioning Kirk’s assassination and arguing that, in light of the tragedy, the event was all the more important.
“We had to host this event today because our democracy, our ability to govern ourselves as Americans … will perish if violence silences us,” Muñoz said.
Muñoz asked Barrett her thoughts on the state of the country in light of recent events. Barrett denounced political violence as a “grotesque symptom” of the state of a “poisonous” political discourse in America and stressed the need to disagree civilly.
“I think it’s important … that we learn to have disagreements in a civil and collegial way, and [at] Notre Dame, that is, as Fr. Bob said, in the DNA here,” Barrett said.
Barrett recounted her decision to accept President Donald Trump’s nomination to the Supreme Court in 2020. Barrett was a federal judge on the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals in Chicago and was still teaching classes at Notre Dame Law School. While honored by the nomination, she said she hesitated, realizing the impact the decision would have on her family, especially her seven children. She recalled that her husband, Jesse Barrett, told her that if she accepted the nomination, she should be all-in on the decision, urging her to “burn the boats” and not look back.
“It’s just not sustainable to second guess the choices you would make. So I haven't thought about it,” she said.
Barrett said she wrote her new book, which focuses on her own life, the workings of the court, and the history of constitutional interpretation, as a form of civic education meant to give readers a firmer understanding of the judicial process.
“I wanted those who don’t know the court to get to know it,” Barrett said. “I love the court and I love the constitution and I want to share it with people, I want to invite people in and I think it’s easier to have confidence in institutions when you understand them.”
Barrett noted she sometimes disagrees vociferously with her colleagues on the court, as evident in her recent majority opinion in “Trump v. Casa,” in which she denounced Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson’s dissenting opinion as “at odds with more than two centuries’ worth of precedent, not to mention the Constitution itself.”
She stressed, however, that, as in this case, she aims to attack her fellow justices’ ideas and not them personally. Barrett said, perhaps contrary to popular belief, the justices have positive working relationships with each other and get lunch together every day when oral arguments are taking place at the court.
“We have life tenure, so I think it is much like an arranged marriage with no option for divorce. You don’t pick your colleagues, but you will be working with them for the long haul,” Barrett said. “You can much more easily debate heatedly with people when you know not to take it personally, because you are perfectly warm to them when you actually have relationships with them.”
During the discussion, Barrett focused particularly on the doctrine of originalism, arguing for its superiority over other doctrines of judicial interpretation. Barrett defined originalism as focusing primarily on the text of the constitution and seeking to understand what it meant at the time it was written.
“If you believe as I do that the constitutional text is the law and if you think that the words that comprise the law are understood as they were understood by those who ratified it, then it doesn’t really matter if it’s hard, it is the task of the judge,” she said.
She explained that while precedence still plays an important role in deciding cases in an originalist mindset, precedence that is not in agreement with the constitution should be reversed, unless the precedent has been long established and overturning it would be particularly disruptive.
Speaking on the 2022 Supreme Court case “Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization,” which overturned “Roe v. Wade,” Barrett said her decision to side with the majority hinged on the fact that “Roe v. Wade” had misinterpreted previous precedence on the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment in a way that was not originalist.
Barrett argued that more “pragmatic” interpretations of the law, favored by liberal justices, give too much power to judges to influence the law. However, Barrett also argued against conservative critiques of originalism, which attack the results that it sometimes produces, framing this position as advocating for an improper role for the judiciary.
“If you want different results, turn to the democratic process,” Barrett said. “If you want results, turn to your fellow citizens for results. For courts, we’re about applying the law.”
Along similar lines, Barrett stressed that she aims to separate her personal beliefs from her decision making as a justice, arguing it was her duty to do so in a pluralistic society.
“I can honestly say that I have disciplined myself and worked very hard to set those things aside,” she said. “If I did think I wasn’t going to be able to separate my moral views, I would recuse from the case rather than impose my own moral views on the law.”
While her faith and personal beliefs, which she said were shaped in many ways by her time at Notre Dame Law School, may not influence how she decides cases, Barrett emphasized that they do shape the person she is and the way she thinks about her job and duty as a justice.
“Notre Dame has made me a different kind of person, and therefore I think I think about my contribution to the law, to society, thinking about my job as a form of public service,” Barrett said. “I think [in] all of those things, Notre Dame has shaped who I am.”
