On Book Tour, Justice Barrett Declares Her Independence

BY JESS BRAVIN

Justice Amy Coney Barrett’s judicial career has been shaped by President Trump, who appointed her to the bench and then dominated its docket through years of litigation over election disputes, criminal charges and, since returning to the White House in January, appeals over his unprecedented efforts to amass executive power.

But when deciding those cases, she said Thursday, she wasn’t thinking about Trump at all. The Supreme Court has “to imagine that it was President Biden, President Bush, you know, president-yet-to-be 50 years from now. Because the answer has to be the same,” she told a New York audience gathered for a discussion of her book, “Listening to the Law,” which hits the shelves Tuesday. We face “a time of passionate disagreement in America,” she allowed, but said the country was far from a constitutional crisis. Barrett launched her September book tour at Lincoln Center, where Bari Weiss, founder and editor of the Free Press, a right-leaning website, posed friendly questions before a paying audience. The justice signed copies at the National Book Festival in Washington on Saturday, with more stops to come. According to financial disclosures, Barrett has so far received $425,000 of a reported $2 million advance.

In the five years since her contentious appointment to succeed the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Barrett has emerged as the most enigmatic— she used the term “independent thinker” on Thursday— of the three Trump nominees on the high court. Solidly conservative on the issues that have motivated the Republican base, she has voted to rescind abortion rights, deny protected status to transgender individuals, curb agency powers, and privilege religious exercise over secular interests.

But while largely approving Trump’s actions, on a few occasions she has split from other conservative justices to vote alongside her liberal colleagues against the administration’s position, drawing criticism from the MAGA base.

“There’s no sign that she wants to be seen as a member of the team. She wants to be recognized as having her own ideas,” said David Strauss, a University of Chicago law professor who directs the school’s Supreme Court clinic.

Still, she hasn’t been shy about criticizing liberal justices’ opinions for fretting over the vast power the court has accorded Trump.

In June, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson dissented from a 6-3 Barrett opinion curbing district judges’ power to issue universal injunctions, a major goal of the Trump administration, saying it was an “existential threat to the rule of law” that effectively authorized the president to act illegally.

Barrett’s opinion riposted: “Justice Jackson decries an imperial Executive while embracing an imperial Judiciary.” On Thursday, she said it was nothing personal, but Jackson’s argument demanded a strong response.

As it happens, the same night Jackson was at the Gantt Center for African-American Arts & Culture in Charlotte, N.C., to discuss her own memoir, “Lovely One.” Jackson’s disclosures report some $3 million so far in royalty advances. Justices Clarence Thomas, Sonia Sotomayor and Neil Gorsuch also have published books, as has retired Justice Stephen Breyer, and both Justice Brett Kavanaugh and retired Justice Anthony Kennedy have volumes of their own in the works.

This judicial side hustle is nothing new, according to retired law professor Ronald Collins, who has compiled a list of nearly 400 books written by Supreme Court justices since the 1790s. Chief Justice John Marshall published a five-volume biography of George Washington soon after joining the court; other justices have written memoirs, legal treatises and histories.

Barrett’s editors had pushed her to be more revealing regarding her life and the bitter partisan circumstances of her confirmation, a person familiar with the matter said, but “Listening to the Law” largely avoids such detail, instead urging respect for the courts and appreciation for constitutional values. The text of the Constitution itself occupies 21 of the book’s 317 pages.