Justice Barrett Is "Not Afraid"

A revealing interview with the Supreme Court's "Steel Magnolia."

Justice Amy Coney Barrett has been giving lots of interviews summer and fall as she promotes her best-selling book, Listening to the Law: Reflections on the Court and Constitution. Many of these interviews cover what is now well-trodden ground. Reading them all gets repetitive.

An exception is this recent interview by Jan Crawford of CBS News which digs a little more deeply into Justice Barrett's perspective about how she approaches her work on the Court (and much else).

Among the topics they discuss is how Justice Barrett feels about being protested, criticized, and potentially threatened. From the interview:

For Barrett, protesters have become routine, another logistical wrinkle in her everyday life, much like the ones who regularly gather at her home outside Washington, D.C., where she lives with her husband and younger children. What surprises her, she told me in a wide-ranging interview in her chambers late last month, is how she can let it roll off her back.

"If I had imagined before I was on the Court, how I would react to knowing that I was being protested, that would have seemed like a big deal, like, 'oh, my gosh, I'm being protested,'" she says. "But now I have the ability to be like, 'Oh, okay, well, are the entrances blocked?' I just feel very businesslike about it. It doesn't matter to me. It doesn't disrupt my emotions." . . .

As Crawford notes, criticism of the Court has led to threats on the justices themselves. The individual who sought to kill Justice Kavanaugh was just sentenced (to a paltry eight years), and there appears to have been a threat to several justices at this past weekend's "Red Mass."

I asked Barrett if she is ever afraid. Her response was immediate and emphatic: "I'm not afraid."

"You can't live your life in fear," she continued. "And I think people who threaten — the goal is to cause fear. And I'm not afraid. I'm not going to reward threats with their intended reaction."

That kind of mental discipline and self control, even in the face of threats and extreme criticism, reflects an outlook that has guided the 53-year-old Barrett much of her life.

Given the threats justices face in our current moment, criticism from commentators would seem to be small potatoes.

Her critics aren't convinced, but Barrett seems unfazed by the attacks on her judgment or her character. In our conversation, and in multiple interviews with those who know her, she comes across as someone with a strong sense of self and an equally clear view on the right way to interpret the Constitution. Unlike some justices, she says she doesn't monitor what journalists and law professors and politicians say about the Court. She has seen them get it wrong. It doesn't matter to her.

"If I could have, especially as a 16-year-old, imagined that I would not care or be impervious to being criticized and mocked, I would have been very surprised," she says. "And so I am glad, because I think this would be a miserable job if you let yourself care, if you let yourself be affected."

There is lots more in the interview. One other fun tidbit is this discussion of how she came to consider herself an originalist.

In our interview, Barrett said she was drawn to originalism when she read Justice Scalia's opinions in a constitutional law class during her second year at Notre Dame Law School. She said she was frustrated after a first-year criminal law class, reading liberal decisions of the Warren Court and finding them to be "unmoored." Scalia's opinions, with his originalist framework, made sense to her.

"I think I am different in style than Justice Scalia. I don't think I'm different in substance," she said. "I think one thing that was important to Justice Scalia is fidelity to his analytical framework, so fidelity to textualism and originalism, even when it led to places that he didn't want to go."

The full interview is worth a read. It is available here.

Comments

[not guilty]

Protests and demonstrations outside Justice Bear It's home are a mild intrusion on the privacy of her family.

Cry. Me. A. Freaking. River!

[Stephen Lathrop]

not guilty — First, I think you ought to reconsider that comment.

Second, I don't take Justice Barrett at her word, although I think her words were admirable and well chosen.

It may be easy for someone without family to shrug off threats of violence toward themselves. Children will remain to some irreducible extent hostages to public happenstance, for which any parent threatened will never escape a nagging sense of responsibility.

Third, threats against judges ought to be a matter of special concern, and made public, at least in a general way. The doctrine which dictates open access to court proceedings, and precludes most requests for anonymous process, ought to apply alike to public access to information about whether and how often judges and jurors come under threat.

The public needs to know if it is reasonable to suppose, for instance, that powerful political actors are systematically threatening judges. People may need to consider that information when deciding how to vote.

If it proves impossible to prevent threats against judges and their families, then means ought to be used to assure that people positioned to decide legal outcomes never see whatever threats are made. Willingness to be in the dark on that question ought to be a condition of the job, an unavoidable result of the blindfold which comes with the set of scales.

Presumably, if it became generally known that judges would never receive specific threats, while sending threats remained criminal conduct, then threats intended to influence judicial outcomes would all but vanish. The public knows that is not the current situation. That seems a point somewhat more important to judicial legitimacy than any question whether a would-be plaintiff can proceed anonymously.

[Lee Moore]

1. I agree. not guilty is being churlish. On account of being a churl.

2. I also agree. It's hard to believe that threats to family bounce right off her. You've got to be analytical to the point of robotic to manage that.

3. I also agree that nevertheless she has to say she's not affected.

OK that's three agreements with one Lathrop post. That's your lot for the year.

[not guilty]

Justice Bear It and five of her fellow black robed wardheelers had no compunction about upending tens of millions of American families' privacy and personal autonomy by interfering in women's and parenting couples' family planning options. The CBS interview linked by Professor Adler makes clear that she is callous and remorseless about causing such upheaval.

I don't want to see harm come to her or any member of her family. A bit of disquietude, however, is fair game.

[Lee Moore]

Even Sarcastro pretends to think that judges should pay some attention to the laws they are presented with - presumably because he recognizes, tactically, that stating openly that judges should just arrive at the answers which deliver the consequences he likes, any damn how they like, might undermine people's faith in the law as a dispassionate system of adjudication.

You are obviously bolder.

[Sarcastr0]

'I note Sarcastro posts some things I don't hate about his judicial philosophy. This must be bad faith.'

Way to be a hater.

[Lee Moore]

Hate and ridicule are entirely different concepts.

[not guilty]

Roe v. Wade was a poorly reasoned, result oriented opinion which incidentally delivered a good result, which became woven into the fabric of American family life.

Generations of women and girls organized their lives to include the availability of safe and legal abortion, should it become necessary. (Men did as well, but that is of secondary importance.) That societal reliance interest should properly have precluded reversal of Roe and Planned Parenthood v. Casey.

[The Margrave of Azilia]

"(Men did as well, but that is of secondary importance.)"

I don't see this as at all secondary. Roe and Doe were decisions issued by an all-male court, a decision taken advantage of by males, and males are as divided over the issue as women. This is not a battle of the sexes but a battle between pro-abortionists of both sexes and anti-abortionists of both sexes.

And *some* men have been known to pressure, or even threaten, their unwilling girlfriends to exercise their "choice" to abort.

Men are certainly in the picture here.

[Lee Moore]

Reliance interests are probably the most feeble argument advanced by those who disapprove of Dobbs. In the first place, nobody could have a reliance interest more than nine months or so after the decision, even in theory. And as for those who were already pregnant at the time of the decision, they had been warned for years by - well, the likes of you - that the placing of a coven of Catholic fanatics on SCOTUS would result in the repeal of Roe. Moreover the judgement was leaked long before it was issued. If you'd planned your life on getting an abortion before the "right" was taken from you, you'd have had to have been in a coma to miss the boat. Nobody had any reliance interest at all.

But that's basically all you've got. You accept that Roe was crap. And Dobbs was the precise opposite of Roe - it didn't make anything up, it simply pointed out the obvious - that there was no there there. If that gives you a hissy fit - your jurisprudence is simply Leninist. Who whom ?

btw I enjoyed "incidentally" - yup, it was just happenstance that the crap legal reasoning landed on exactly the place the judges wanted it to land. The "good result" was a bad result for half the population (as the Margrave says - not the male half, the pro life half.)

This is precisely where judges paying attention to consequences lands you. SCOTUS as an unelected super legislature. No wonder it's a knife fight at confirmation time, and people assemble bombs outside churches that the Justices frequent. The only way to simmer it all down is to accept that judges have no business worrying about the consequences of their decisions. That's a job for politicians.

[David Nieporent]

Reliance interests are probably the most feeble argument advanced by those who disapprove of Dobbs. In the first place, nobody could have a reliance interest more than nine months or so after the decision, even in theory. And as for those who were already pregnant at the time of the decision, they had been warned for years by - well, the likes of you - that the placing of a coven of Catholic fanatics on SCOTUS would result in the repeal of Roe. Moreover the judgement was leaked long before it was issued. If you'd planned your life on getting an abortion before the "right" was taken from you, you'd have had to have been in a coma to miss the boat. Nobody had any reliance interest at all.

I tend to agree with this, especially given that both birth control and Plan B remain legal and available. Abortion is more for people who didn't "organize their lives," which is the opposite of reliance.

[JoeFromtheBronx]

Abortion is regularly something married women (check the statistics) whose lives are quite organized have.

(As to "Plan B," some people argue that such things are "abortifacients," and should be banned or at least made significantly harder to get. Also, for a variety of reasons, people who have abortions -- medical or otherwise -- with organized lives to not use that.)

For whatever reason, they decide having a child is not appropriate for their wellbeing.

As for non-married, there are many people with quite "organized" lives, but who decide a child would not be appropriate or perhaps their health makes a pregnancy problematic. A person, for instance, in their early 20s.

Even a teenager having an abortion meets this in various ways. Teens have less power to organize their lives, but they still have some power to do so, including perhaps those who plan to go to college and decide a pregnancy would be a problem for that.

People for decades have assumed that they had the power to regulate their reproductive lives, both via birth control and abortion. Society and so forth has developed with this assumption in mind.

When "Cassandras" argued abortion rights (and now birth control) will be threatened, even those against abortion regularly sneered they were exaggerating. Supporters assumed abortion rights were safe and did not prepare for when they were gone. This all goes to reliance.

These reliance issues didn't disappear within nine months of Dobbs. People who set up their lives with assumptions that if something came up that they could have an abortion (or use birth control) are still affected.

Likewise, "reliance issues" is a conservative value concerned with overturning a long in place applecart. This might include how an institution (let's say the criminal justice system) is set up, with society relying on it operating in a certain way.

BTW, the "superlegislature" is something the other side (to answer the original comment) supports depending on whose ox is being gored.

Also, Roe v. Wade was not "crap" -- the argument was that it's reasoning was bad. And that it was "results orientated." This can be said about lots of court opinions. The core holding was not rejected. The person argued Douglas' concurrence was a better reasoned analysis.

I also think it is somewhat exaggerated as to Roe, especially regarding parts of the opinion. Anyway, Planned Parenthood v. Casey was better argued. Constitutional law does not rest on how the Supreme Court writes a case.

[The Margrave of Azilia]

You seem to assume adoption isn't a viable (so to speak) option.

[David Nieporent]

These reliance issues didn't disappear within nine months of Dobbs. People who set up their lives with assumptions that if something came up that they could have an abortion (or use birth control) are still affected.

Reliance interests involves more than just assuming that things wouldn't change. It involves the notion that one would have done things differently if one knew those things would change.

So, for example, there are reliance interests attached to Social Security because one cannot go back in time and save more money, as one would've had to do if one knew that Social Security would be abolished. But what would one have done differently in the past if abortion were outlawed tomorrow?

[dwb68]

If everything is a protest, nothing is a protest.

[The Margrave of Azilia]

CBS did a soft-focus, sympathetic interview with a conservative judge?

[Mr. Bumble]

Getting ready for the new direction when Bari Weiss takes charge.

[The Margrave of Azilia]

I just noticed an article about that on the Reason side. I haven't been keeping up.

[y81]

I'm surprised that she says she doesn't listen to law professors. To whom she does she listen? Presumably she listens to the advocates arguing in each case. (I hope.) But surely their arguments are shaped by their education, in and after law school, i.e., by the writings (and lectures) of law professors. And I would think she would understand the advocates' arguments better if she understood their provenance. So not listening to law professors, and attempting to consider each argument afresh. without regard to its origins and underlying premises, seems like a mistake to me.