Amy Coney Barrett’s chambers once broke out a bottle of champagne to celebrate her fellow Supreme Court justices joining a “tricky” opinion she authored, according to her unreleased memoir.
Listening to the Law is scheduled to be released on September 9 and earned the conservative justice a $2 million advance, according to CNN, which obtained a copy of the book.
The book defends Coney Barrett’s decision to end the constitutional right to an abortion and offers a behind-the-scenes look at how the court operates, detailing her daily life since President Donald Trump appointed her to fill the late Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s seat in 2020.
“The best days are when ‘join’ memos come in quickly and without requests for changes,” Coney Barrett wrote. “Once, when other justices quickly joined a particularly tricky opinion of mine, my chambers celebrated with an impromptu bottle of champagne.”
The book doesn’t say which decision inspired the celebration.
Given that manuscripts for major publishers need to be finalized months in advance—Listening is being released by Penguin Random House’s conservative imprint, Sentinel—she probably wasn’t referring to her June decision to rein in lower courts that have ruled against Trump’s policies, according to CNN.
The conservative justice has emerged as one of the most closely watched members of the court, after she broke with her fellow conservatives to side with the court’s liberal justices on a pair of cases involving the Trump administration.
The former Notre Dame law professor and federal appellate judge also recused herself from a high-profile case involving a Catholic charter school, which ultimately led to a conservative defeat, and ripped into Trump’s solicitor general for disrespecting her liberal colleague Justice Elena Kagan.
When she announced her book in March, she said she wanted to make the court less of a “mystery” for readers, The New York Times reported.
Over the past few years, the Supreme Court has been rocked by a series of leaks involving abortion-related decisions.
The court has failed to uncover who leaked a draft decision of the 2022 decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the case that overturned Roe v. Wade and ended the constitutional right to an abortion.
The Trump administration reopened the case in May, but so far, the FBI has only managed to uncover more information about the fault lines that have emerged between Coney Barrett and the other conservative justices.
In June 2024, the court accidentally posted its decision striking down Idaho’s draconian abortion ban, only to quickly remove the ruling until it could be officially released.
Internal communications about the case, Moyle v. United States, were leaked to CNN the following month, revealing that the decision was the culmination of a six-month battle between the six conservative justices.
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