On Thursday evening, Justice Amy Coney Barrett walked onto a spotlit Lincoln Center stage and into the tricky position of trying to explain a court that has often, in recent months, declined to explain itself.
The appearance in New York kicked off a round of publicity events for Justice Barrett’s book, “Listening to the Law,” to be published Tuesday. The book is Justice Barrett’s bid for trust in the Supreme Court. Writing in a civics-textbook tone, she describes how she reasons her way through cases and calls herself scrupulously neutral.
“My office doesn’t entitle me to align the legal system with my moral or policy views,” she writes. “Swearing to apply the law faithfully means deciding each case based on my best judgment about what the law is. If I decide a case based on my judgment about what the law should be, I’m cheating.”
“Thinking in those categories of left and right, it’s just the wrong way to think about the law,” she added at the packed event on Thursday, hosted by The Free Press, the four-year-old online media outlet.
Justice Barrett plays an extraordinarily powerful role on the court, as part of the three-member fulcrum whose votes often decide cases, and her book is billed as a rare look inside her work.
But her book, and the publicity events, may also draw attention for all she doesn’t answer. In “Listening to the Law,” she does not grapple with the paradox of her position: Though Justice Barrett has clinched a 50-year conservative legal revolution, overturning precedents on abortion, affirmative action and gun control, she also is seeking a reputation for independence and the trust of Americans with diverse views.
And while she has sometimes sided with Democratic-appointed justices since she joined the court, she has almost never voted with them in major cases.
Some current justices who have published books have stuck to the gentle terrain of early-life memoirs. Justice Barrett has chosen a trickier path. Appointed in 2020 amid a slide, documented by polls, in the court’s reputation, she received a reported $2 million advance to write a book. Becoming a justice made her see how many questions people have about the court, how mysterious and remote its workings can seem, she writes. So she set out to explain her job and professional home, sitting down to draft the book in the summer of 2024, she has said.
Then Donald J. Trump was again elected president. Justice Barrett is now trying to rebuild public trust — and sell books — amid massive disagreement about the fundamentals of the legal system. Mr. Trump is pushing the boundaries of the Constitution. His executive orders are pinballing their way through the federal courts and up to the Supreme Court for review.
Judges and their families, including Justice Barrett and her extended clan, have recently been targeted in intimidation campaigns. Some of Mr. Trump’s allies lash out when the judges he appointed fail to back his agenda, while a large chunk of the public — and legal establishment — voices concern that Justice Barrett and the other Republican-appointed justices are handing him too much power.
In the book, she instructs Americans to sit down and read through the court’s opinions before coming to conclusions about its work. But on some sensitive recent decisions in response to emergency applications filed by the Trump administration, there have been no opinions to read. In those cases, the court issued terse orders that lacked any legal reasoning.
Justice Barrett writes that the court’s silence in emergency decisions often means that the justices have not reached a firm conclusion. “Committing the court’s reasoning to print risks hardening what should be tentative into something more definite,” she says.
Even as Justice Barrett sounds notes of calm and confidence about the institution, Justice Elena Kagan has called for the court to explain itself more fully, and Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson has described it in dire terms, recently writing that her colleagues are “enabling our collective demise.”
Justice Barrett received a warm reception at Thursday night’s conversation, conducted by Bari Weiss, the founder and editor of the Free Press. A program for the event included a note that Justice Barrett’s “work on the bench reflects the kind of intellectual seriousness — and humility — we admire at The Free Press.”
For the next few weeks, Justice Barrett will be rolling out her book in a series of events and interviews, but even as she tries to increase the public’s understanding of the court, it’s not clear how much she will delve into Americans’ most urgent questions. Last week, she canceled a long-arranged audio interview with The Times’s “The Daily” podcast.
In the onstage talk, Justice Barrett mostly adopted a turn-the-temperature down tone. She said that the country was not in a constitutional crisis, and that she didn’t even know what one would look like. Instead, she said, the nation was in an era of “passionate disagreement.”
She also addressed the sexual misconduct allegations made against Justice Brett Kavanaugh during his 2018 confirmation hearings. “Brett Kavanaugh is a friend and a good man,” she said. “And I watched what he was going through, and it was extremely painful.”
Given the chance to back away from a recent public clash with a colleague, she declined. Justice Barrett is generally a calm writer. But in writing a court opinion limiting use of nationwide injunctions, which critics fear will constrain judges from blocking illegal moves by Mr. Trump, she traded harsh words with Justice Jackson.
Asked if she regretted the exchange, Justice Barrett said no, drawing hearty applause from the room. “I thought Justice Jackson had made an argument in strong terms that I thought warranted a response,” she said.
“I’m from New Orleans, and I know everyone likes a little Tabasco once in a while,” she added.
Jodi Kantor is a Times investigative reporter and co-author of “She Said,” which recounts how she and Megan Twohey broke the story of sexual abuse allegations against Harvey Weinstein. Her current focus is the Supreme Court.
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