Amy Coney Barrett Wrote a Book for People Who Already Like Amy Coney Barrett

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.

“Yes, we get along.” Barrett dedicates an entire chapter of Listening to the Law to how she and her colleagues strive to be collegial despite deep differences about how to interpret the Constitution and the law—how they strive to have lunch together without dwelling on specific cases, and how it fell to her to host a dinner for Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson when she arrived to the court in 2022. As she explains, just as people don’t get to pick the families they’re born into, neither do Supreme Court justices get to pick whom they’ll serve with for a lifetime. She compares that reality to “an arranged marriage with no option of divorce.” And yet, even as recently as this summer, both Barrett and Jackson were enmeshed in a heated war of words about the extent to which the Supreme Court was willing to bend the rules to let Trump get away with some of his most controversial policy priorities, which Barrett acknowledged during the launch of her book tour last week.

Roe v. Wade was an “exercise in raw judicial power.” Trump promised justices who would deliver on his pledge to overrule Roe v. Wade, and with it nearly 50 years of a fundamental right that protected a person’s autonomy to end their pregnancy. Appointing Barrett was that promise fulfilled. Yet she doesn’t explain her silence in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health, which overturned that landmark ruling, where she quietly joined Justice Samuel Alito’s majority opinion with nary an objection. Neither does she explain how the Supreme Court bent its own internal rules to reach a desired outcome. (While John Roberts voted in favor of Dobbs, not even he would join the majority opinion of the court.) Instead, writing like a law professor would, Barrett defends Dobbs by simply repeating what it says: that the court that decided Roe engaged in an “exercise in raw judicial power” in treating abortion as a constitutionally protected right.

The Roberts Court doesn’t overturn a lot of precedent. The disruptive end of Roe v. Wade aside, Barrett offers a lawyerly lecture on stare decisis, the principle that she and her colleagues don’t overturn precedent lightly, but stand by things their predecessors have decided in the past. Or as she put it, “The Court sticks with the first answer it gives.” During this section, she offers this curious line: “The Roberts Court, of which I’m part, has overturned precedent roughly once per term.” By which she suggests that the current Supreme Court, which under Roberts has also dealt blows to affirmative action and the Voting Rights Act, isn’t as disruptive as, say, the one that was led by Chief Justice Earl Warren—which she notes overruled precedent much more frequently. But that comparison proves too much. The Warren Court gave us Brown v. Board of Education and ushered in a rights revolution that extended protections to people whom the Constitution historically shut out. In short, of course prior courts overruled more precedents: they had a lot of cleanup work to do.