62 Facts About Amy Coney Barrett

Amy Vivian Coney Barrett was born on January 28,1972 and is an American lawyer and jurist who serves as an associate justice of the Supreme Court of the United States.

Amy Coney Barrett graduated from Rhodes College before attending Notre Dame Law School, earning a JD with distinction in 1997.

Amy Coney Barrett then clerked for Judge Laurence Silberman and Justice Antonin Scalia.

In 2002, Amy Coney Barrett joined the faculty at Notre Dame Law School, becoming a professor in 2010.

On September 26,2020, Trump nominated Amy Coney Barrett to succeed Ruth Bader Ginsburg on the Supreme Court of the United States.

Amy Coney Barrett's nomination was controversial because the 2020 presidential election was only 38 days away and Senate Republicans had refused to hold hearings for Merrick Garland during an election year in 2016.

Amy Coney Barrett is generally considered to be among the Court's conservative bloc.

Amy Vivian Coney was born in 1972 in New Orleans, Louisiana, to Linda and Michael Coney.

Amy Coney Barrett's father worked as an attorney for Shell Oil Company, and her mother was a high school French teacher and homemaker.

Amy Coney Barrett's great-great-grandparents emigrated from France to New Orleans.

Amy Coney Barrett's family is devoutly Catholic, and her father is an ordained deacon at St Catherine of Siena Parish in Metairie, Louisiana, where she grew up.

Amy Coney Barrett attended St Mary's Dominican High School, an all-girls Roman Catholic high school in New Orleans.

Amy Coney Barrett was student body vice president of the school and graduated in 1990.

Amy Coney Barrett considers herself "somewhat fluent" in French, but with a Louisiana accent.

Amy Coney Barrett then attended Notre Dame Law School on a full-tuition scholarship.

Amy Coney Barrett spent two years as a judicial law clerk after law school, first for judge Laurence Silberman of the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit from 1997 to 1998, and then for justice Antonin Scalia of the US Supreme Court from 1998 to 1999.

In 2001, Barrett was a visiting associate professor and John M Olin Fellow in Law at George Washington University Law School.

Amy Coney Barrett's scholarship focused on constitutional law, originalism, statutory interpretation, and stare decisis.

At Notre Dame, Amy Coney Barrett received the "Distinguished Professor of the Year" award three times.

In 2010, Chief Justice John Roberts appointed Amy Coney Barrett to serve on the Advisory Committee for the Federal Rules of Appellate Procedure.

Amy Coney Barrett said these cases are "binding precedents" that she intended to "faithfully follow if confirmed" to the appeals court, as required by law.

Amy Coney Barrett's nomination was supported by every law clerk she had worked with and all of her 49 faculty colleagues at Notre Dame Law school.

Amy Coney Barrett is the first and only woman to occupy an Indiana seat on the Seventh Circuit.

Amy Coney Barrett did not join the panel opinion, but voted with four judges to deny the petition to rehear the case.

In 2019, Barrett wrote the unanimous three-judge panel opinion affirming summary judgment in the case of Smith v Illinois Department of Transportation.

Amy Coney Barrett wrote that usage of the racial slur was egregious, but Smith's testimony showed no evidence that his subjective experience of the workplace changed because of the slur, nor did it change the department's fact that his discharge was related to "poor performance".

In June 2020, Amy Coney Barrett wrote a 40-page dissent when the majority upheld a preliminary injunction against the Trump administration's controversial "public charge rule", which heightened the standard for obtaining a green card.

Amy Coney Barrett would have held that the new rule fell within the broad scope of discretion granted to the Executive by Congress through the Immigration and Nationality Act.

Amy Coney Barrett declined to address whether the husband had been denied a constitutional right because the consular officer's decision to deny the visa application was facially legitimate and bona fide, and under Supreme Court precedent, in such a case courts will not "look behind the exercise of that discretion".

Amy Coney Barrett wrote a rare opinion concurring in the denial of rehearing en banc.

Amy Coney Barrett had never ruled directly on abortion before joining the Supreme Court, but she did vote to rehear a successful challenge to Indiana's parental notification law in 2019.

In February 2019, Amy Coney Barrett joined a unanimous panel decision upholding a Chicago "bubble ordinance" that prohibits approaching within a certain distance of an abortion clinic or its patrons without consent.

In March 2019, Amy Coney Barrett dissented when the court upheld the federal law prohibiting felons from possessing firearms.

In May 2018, Amy Coney Barrett dissented when the panel majority found that an accused murderer's right to counsel was violated when the state trial judge directly questioned the accused while forbidding his attorney from speaking.

In January 2019, Amy Coney Barrett wrote for a unanimous panel when it denied qualified immunity to a civil lawsuit sought by a defendant who as a homicide detective had knowingly provided false and misleading information in the probable cause affidavit that was used to obtain an arrest warrant for the plaintiff.

In early September 2020, Barrett joined Wood's opinion upholding the district court's denial of the Illinois Republican Party's request for a preliminary injunction to block Governor J B Pritzker's COVID-19 orders.

In June 2019, Amy Coney Barrett wrote for the unanimous panel when it found that the Fair Debt Collection Practices Act cannot create a cause of action for a debtor who received collection letters lacking notices required by the statute because she suffered no injury-in-fact to create constitutional standing to sue under Article III.

Amy Coney Barrett was on Trump's list of potential Supreme Court nominees since 2017, almost immediately after her court of appeals confirmation.

On September 26,2020, Trump announced his intention to nominate Amy Coney Barrett to fill the vacancy created by Ginsburg's death.

Amy Coney Barrett's nomination was generally supported by Republicans, who sought to confirm her before the 2020 United States presidential election.

Amy Coney Barrett was a favorite among the Christian right and social conservatives.

Amy Coney Barrett is the first justice since 1870 to be confirmed without a single vote from the Senate minority party.

Amy Coney Barrett became the 103rd associate justice of the Supreme Court of the United States on October 27,2020.

Amy Coney Barrett took the judicial oath, administered by Chief Justice John Roberts, the next day.

Amy Coney Barrett is the first justice without an Ivy League degree since the 2010 retirement of John Paul Stevens and the first to be appointed since Sandra Day O'Connor, who graduated from Stanford University and Stanford Law School.

Amy Coney Barrett is the first graduate of Notre Dame Law School and the first former member of the Notre Dame faculty to serve on the Supreme Court.

Amy Coney Barrett has chosen to be called "Justice Barrett" in written orders and opinions of the court, as she did as a Seventh Circuit judge.

In November 2020, Amy Coney Barrett was assigned to the Seventh Circuit.

Ross Guberman, author of Point Taken: How to Write Like the World's Best Judges, told the Times he believed Amy Coney Barrett was the principal author of the Court's decision because of its measured tone and word choices, including its use of the word "show".

In June 2022, Barrett joined with the same majority in Dobbs v Jackson, voting to completely overturn Roe v Wade and Planned Parenthood v Casey.

Amy Coney Barrett is considered a textualist, a proponent of the idea that statutes should be interpreted literally, without considering their legislative history or underlying purpose, and an originalist, a proponent of the idea that the Constitution should be interpreted as perceived at the time of enactment.

Amy Coney Barrett has been critical of legal process theory, which gives a more expansive role to theory in shaping the interpretation of law than do textualism and originalism.

At her 2017 Senate confirmation hearing for the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals, Amy Coney Barrett said she would follow Supreme Court precedent while on the appellate bench.

In 2020, during her nomination acceptance speech at the White House Rose Garden, Amy Coney Barrett said, "Judges are not policymakers, and they must be resolute in setting aside any policy views they might hold"; she said judges "must apply the law as written".

Amy Coney Barrett explained her view of precedent in response to questions at the hearing.

In explaining why it was excluded, Amy Coney Barrett referenced scholarship agreeing that in order to qualify as "superprecedent", a decision must have widespread support from not only jurists but politicians and the public at large to the extent of becoming immune to reversal or challenge.

Amy Coney Barrett argued that the people must trust a ruling's validity to such an extent that the matter has been taken "off of the Court's agenda", with lower courts no longer taking challenges to them seriously.

In 2012, Amy Coney Barrett signed a letter criticizing the Obama administration's approach to providing employees of religious institutions with birth control coverage without having the religious institutions pay for it, calling it an "assault" to religious liberty.

Previously, Jesse Amy Coney Barrett had worked as an Assistant US Attorney for the Northern District of Indiana for 13 years.

In People of Praise, Amy Coney Barrett has served as a laypastoral women's leader in a position once termed "handmaiden" but now termed "women leader".

Amy Coney Barrett was a member of the Federalist Society from 2005 to 2006 and from 2014 to 2017.

Amy Coney Barrett is a member of the American Law Institute.