Justice Barrett Is “Not Afraid”

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.