Amy Coney Barrett

Amy Coney Barrett is an American jurist who served as a United States circuit judge on the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit from 2017 to 2020. Born in 1972, she was appointed to the Seventh Circuit by President Donald J. Trump, a Republican, and confirmed by the Senate on October 31, 2017. Her tenure on the federal appellate court preceded her elevation to the Supreme Court of the United States in 2020, making her the fifth woman to serve on that court. Before her judicial service, Barrett was a longtime professor at Notre Dame Law School, where she taught courses in constitutional law, statutory interpretation, and federal courts, and established herself as a scholar focused on originalism and textualism in legal interpretation.

Early life and legal career

Amy Vivian Coney was born in 1972 in New Orleans, Louisiana, to Michael Coney and Linda Vath Coney. She was the eldest of seven children in a devoutly Catholic family, growing up with five sisters and one brother in Metairie, Louisiana. Her father worked as an attorney for Shell Oil Company and later became an ordained deacon at St. Catherine of Siena Parish, while her mother served as a high school French teacher before becoming a homemaker. Barrett's ancestry includes German, Irish, and French heritage, with maternal ancestors from Ballyconnell, County Cavan, Ireland, and paternal Irish lineage tracing to Terence and Margaret McAdam, who immigrated from Ireland to New Orleans in the late nineteenth century. On her mother's side, her great-great-grandfather Firmin Daste emigrated from Bordeaux, France, to New Orleans in 1859.

Barrett attended St. Mary's Dominican High School, an all-girls Roman Catholic institution in New Orleans, where she served as student body vice president and graduated in 1990. She then enrolled at Rhodes College in Memphis, Tennessee, where she pursued a major in English literature with a minor in French. During her undergraduate years, she developed what she later described as a somewhat fluent command of French, though with a Louisiana accent. She graduated from Rhodes College in 1994 with a Bachelor of Arts degree, magna cum laude, earning recognition as the most outstanding English department graduate in her class and induction into both Omicron Delta Kappa and Phi Beta Kappa honor societies.

Barrett attended Notre Dame Law School on a full-tuition scholarship, where she served as an executive editor of the Notre Dame Law Review. She graduated in 1997 with a Juris Doctor degree, summa cum laude, finishing first in her class. Following law school, she completed two prestigious federal judicial clerkships. From 1997 to 1998, she clerked for Judge Laurence Silberman of the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. She then served as a law clerk to Justice Antonin Scalia of the Supreme Court of the United States from 1998 to 1999, an experience that would prove formative in shaping her judicial philosophy.

After completing her clerkships, Barrett entered private practice at Miller Cassidy Larroca & Lewin, a boutique litigation firm in Washington, D.C., where she worked from 1999 to 2002. The firm merged with the Houston-based Baker Botts in 2001. During her time at Baker Botts, she contributed research and briefing assistance to the firm's representation of George W. Bush in the litigation arising from the 2000 presidential election.

In 2001, Barrett began her academic career as a visiting associate professor and John M. Olin Fellow in Law at George Washington University Law School. The following year, she joined the faculty at Notre Dame Law School, her alma mater, where she would spend the next fifteen years as a professor and scholar. At Notre Dame, her teaching portfolio included courses in federal courts, evidence, constitutional law, and statutory interpretation. She was named a full professor of law in 2010 and held the Diane and M.O. Miller II Research Chair of Law from 2014 to 2017. In 2007, she served as a visiting professor at the University of Virginia School of Law.

Barrett's scholarly work concentrated on constitutional law, originalism, statutory interpretation, and the doctrine of stare decisis. Her academic articles appeared in prominent law reviews including those of Columbia, Cornell, Virginia, Notre Dame, and Texas. She received the Distinguished Professor of the Year award at Notre Dame three times, reflecting her reputation as an effective educator. From 2011 to 2016, she participated as a speaker on constitutional law at the Blackstone Legal Fellowship, a summer program for law students established by the Alliance Defending Freedom to promote a Christian perspective on legal issues. In 2010, Chief Justice John Roberts appointed her to serve on the Advisory Committee for the Federal Rules of Appellate Procedure, a position that involved her in the technical work of maintaining federal court procedures.

Federal appellate service

President Donald J. Trump, a Republican, nominated Barrett to the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit on May 8, 2017. The nomination came after Judge John Daniel Tinder assumed senior status, creating a vacancy on the court. The Seventh Circuit has jurisdiction over federal appeals from Illinois, Indiana, and Wisconsin. The Senate Judiciary Committee held a hearing on her nomination on September 6, 2017. The Senate confirmed her appointment on October 31, 2017, and she assumed the seat designated as CA70409.

During her service on the Seventh Circuit, Barrett maintained her connection to Notre Dame Law School, commuting between Chicago, where the court sits, and South Bend, Indiana, home of the university. She continued to teach courses on statutory interpretation and constitutional theory while fulfilling her judicial duties. This arrangement allowed her to balance her responsibilities as a federal appellate judge with her commitment to legal education.

Barrett's tenure on the Seventh Circuit lasted from 2017 until 2020. Her service on the court provided her with experience in federal appellate decision-making across a range of legal issues that come before the circuit courts, including matters of constitutional law, statutory interpretation, criminal procedure, and administrative law. As a circuit judge, she participated in three-judge panels that heard appeals from federal district courts within the Seventh Circuit's geographic jurisdiction.

Her time on the Seventh Circuit was relatively brief compared to many federal appellate judges, as she served for approximately three years before her elevation to a higher court. Nevertheless, this period gave her practical experience in the collegial decision-making process characteristic of appellate courts, where judges must work together to reach consensus or articulate their disagreements in written opinions.

Jurisprudence and legacy

Barrett's judicial philosophy, developed during her academic career and clerkship with Justice Antonin Scalia, centers on textualism in statutory interpretation and originalism in constitutional interpretation. Textualism focuses on the ordinary meaning of legal texts at the time of their enactment, while originalism seeks to interpret the Constitution according to its original public meaning. These methodologies, which she studied and taught extensively during her years at Notre Dame, informed her approach to legal questions during her time on the Seventh Circuit.

As a protégée of Justice Scalia, Barrett absorbed and developed the interpretive methods that he championed throughout his career on the Supreme Court. Her scholarly work examined these approaches in depth, contributing to academic discussions about how judges should interpret legal texts and the role of precedent in constitutional adjudication. Her academic focus on stare decisis—the doctrine requiring courts to follow precedent—reflected her engagement with one of the central tensions in originalist jurisprudence: how to balance fidelity to original meaning with respect for established legal precedents.

Barrett's service on the Seventh Circuit represented a transition from academic theorizing about legal interpretation to the practical application of those theories in deciding actual cases. The experience of working within the federal appellate system, collaborating with other judges appointed by presidents of both parties, and addressing the full range of issues that come before a circuit court provided her with a foundation in the institutional practices of the federal judiciary.

Following her confirmation to the Supreme Court in 2020, Barrett's brief tenure on the Seventh Circuit became part of her professional background as an associate justice. She has been described as generally aligned with the conservative bloc on the Supreme Court, though observers have noted instances of independence and moderation in her voting patterns. In September 2025, she published her first book, titled "Listening to the Law," extending her engagement with legal theory and interpretation beyond her judicial opinions.

Her career trajectory—from first-in-class law student to Supreme Court clerk, to distinguished law professor, to federal circuit judge, and finally to Supreme Court justice—reflects a path through multiple sectors of the legal profession. Her three years on the Seventh Circuit, though relatively short, provided an important bridge between her academic work and her service on the nation's highest court, giving her direct experience with the federal appellate process and the practical challenges of judicial decision-making in a collegial court environment.