The idiosyncratic originalism of Amy Coney Barrett

What the prospective Supreme Court justice thinks

Amy Coney Barrett.
(Image credit: Illustrated | iStock, Screenshot/YouTube)

Hundreds of thousands of words have already been written about the logistics of nominating a justice to replace the late Ruth Bader Ginsburg before this year's presidential election. Since it now appears that President Trump has the votes to secure such a confirmation, there are more relevant questions about the background of the eventual nominee. The frontrunner appears to be Amy Coney Barrett, a U.S. Appeals Court judge and longtime professor at the University of Notre Dame Law School.

Even more digital ink has been spilled since 2018 on the subject of Barrett herself, whose previous federal confirmation hearing was unusually contentious by the standards of such proceedings. Most of the commentary has fallen on predictably partisan lines, with both supporters and critics drawing attention to "Catholic Judges in Capital Cases," a law review article written in 1998 when Barrett was 26 years old. Both sides are almost certainly making too much of the supposed implications of a two-decade-old philosophical essay about the ethics of recusal.

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Matthew Walther

Matthew Walther is a national correspondent at The Week. His work has also appeared in First Things, The Spectator of London, The Catholic Herald, National Review, and other publications. He is currently writing a biography of the Rev. Montague Summers. He is also a Robert Novak Journalism Fellow.