Amy Coney Barrett has very little in common with her fellow justices Clarence Thomas, Sonia Sotomayor, and Ketanji Brown Jackson, all of whom preceded her as authors of bestselling memoirs that, in one way or another, illuminate how they or their families surmounted poverty, discrimination, and other societal barriers on their way to the pinnacle of American law. All three saw the law’s impact firsthand in the trenches, as lawyers—working in government or defending people from it in court. Many found their stories compelling precisely because these authors traced their paths without dwelling much on how they think about their current, far more isolating jobs. Their remembrances stopped, in other words, at or near the Supreme Court steps.
That’s not what Barrett set out to do with her first book, Listening to the Law, which is less about her rise from the legal academy than an apologia about the institution she now inhabits—which, without explaining itself, just yesterday greenlit an effort by the Trump administration to racially profile Latino workers on the basis of their looks, their language, and where they work or seek work. “If I leave you with a better understanding of the Court’s role, how the Constitution shapes American life, and how I think about my job, I will have achieved my goal,” she writes.
Treatises about the law or how judges wrestle with it don’t normally burn up the charts, and so this is a big bet for Penguin Random House, which reportedly offered Barrett a $2 million book deal for pulling back the curtain.
She doesn’t pull back much. Entire sections are devoted to legal history, constitutional debates, and how framers and justices of yesteryear interpreted the Constitution. Neither does she reckon with how she and the current six-justice supermajority on the Supreme Court have upended decades of constitutional law and people’s settled expectations since her arrival there in 2020, right after the death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg—a law professor who helped transform the Constitution before she set out to teach it. Suppose Barrett’s high opinion of the high court were the controlling, final word (luckily, it isn’t): a person who isn’t already a big supporter of its actions might think everything there is fine. They wouldn’t know that its legitimacy and public support remain near historic lows.
Below are six takeaways from Listening to the Law, which comes with an appendix reprinting the entire Constitution of the United States, should readers ever make it that far:
Neither a Democrat nor a Republican. History is written by the victors, and one thread throughout Listening to the Law is the idea that the Supreme Court, which has been steadily ruling for Donald Trump since he took office a second time, does everything according to the law rather than the politics of the issues or the parties that appear before it. Recounting the day of her swearing-in ceremony as associate justice, which was delayed until 2021 due to the COVID-19 pandemic, she marvels at how her commission—the presidential document that appoints her to the position—bore Trump’s signature but was delivered by President Joe Biden’s deputy attorney general, the second in command at the Justice Department. “Once a judge is on the bench, she is a United States judge, not a Democrat or Republican official beholden to a particular administration or party,” Barrett writes.
