Photo credit: Salon.com
Amy Vivian Coney Barrett was born on January 28, 1972 in New Orleans, Louisiana. She attended high school at St. Mary’s Dominican High School and graduated in 1990. Her undergraduate degree is in English Literature from Rhodes College where she graduated in 1994 with induction into Phi Beta Kappa. Her choice for law school was Notre Dame Lw school, on a full tuition scholarship. She was an executive editor of the Notre Dame Law Review and graduated first in her class in 1997 with a Juris Doctor summa cum laude.
Upon graduating, Mrs. Barrett spent two years as a judicial law clerk, first for Judge Laurence Silberman of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit from 1997 to 1998, followed by clerking for Justice Antonin Scalia of the U.S. Supreme Court from 1998 to 1999. From 1999 to 2002, she practiced law at Miller, Cassidy, Larroca & Lewin in Washington, D.C.
Mrs. Barrett served as a visiting associate professor and John M. Olin Fellow in Law at George Washington University Law School for a year before returning to her alma mater, Notre Dame Law School, in 2002. During her tenure at Notre Dame, she has taught federal courts, constitutional law, and statutory interpretation with a primary focus on focuses on constitutional law, originalism, statutory interpretation, and stare decisis. She has continued teaching at Notre Dame while serving as a judge on the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit since her confirmation in 2017.
Since her name became one of the possible successors to Justice Ginsberg, the left has been having conniption fits. It is unlikely there are enough tranquilizers, in the whole world, to calm their hysteria. You may believe the angst is because she is President Trump’s nominee. That is only part of the reason.
The Democrat/progressive/socialist belief is the United States Constitution should be interpreted as a “living document”. That term translates to twisting it every which way to implement law from the bench.
During 2019, she spoke at the District of Columbia branch of Hillsdale College. In speaking about a “living Constitution”, she said;
“If the judge is willing not to apply the law but to decide cases in a line, in accordance with personal preference rather than the law, then she’s not actually functioning as a judge at all. She’s functioning as a policymaker,” Barrett explained.
“And I would have had no interest in the job if the job was about policymaking and about making policy decisions,” the judge said. “My interest is in contributing to our tradition of judges upholding the rule of law.”
It has been asked if she is an “originalist”. During the same speaking engagement, she said the following;
“All judges think that the original meaning of the Constitution—its history, the way that it was understood by those who ratified it, who drafted it, the founding generation—all judges take that as a data point, as relevant,” she said. “Those who are committed to originalism treat it as determinative when the original meaning is discernible. Others just treat it as a data point, but one that would not necessarily control. So that will yield different outcomes in different cases.”
Combining her strong religious faith with being an “originalist” makes her the Democrat/progressive/socialist worst nightmare for the SCOTUS, hence their howling.
As a side note, I believe it is well past time we had someone, with a working brain, be known by their initials. She can become our poster initial representative, ie ACB.