Courts, Law Schools

SCOTUS Candidate Judge Amy Coney Barrett Wasn't My Favorite Law Professor, But She Would Be An Amazing Justice

She's someone with incredible intellect, humanity, thoughtfulness, and judgment.

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Judge Amy Coney Barrett (Screenshot via CSPAN)

In a break from my regularly scheduled intellectual property musings, I write as a former student of Seventh Circuit Judge Amy Coney Barrett, who is now being considered as a potential SCOTUS nominee to replace Justice Anthony Kennedy. As a total law nerd, working on policy issues in Washington, D.C., there’s no question that seeing one of my former law professors on a shortlist for elevation to the highest court in the United States is exciting.

Let me start by being totally candid: Professor Amy Coney Barrett was not my favorite professor in law school. Also: I think she would make an amazing Supreme Court justice.

I attended Notre Dame (class of 2008), a school with a strong Catholic identity. As someone who was born in San Francisco, raised in the Bay Area, and graduated from UC Santa Barbara, Notre Dame was a very different environment. It felt largely conservative, in stark contrast to California; one of my former (and quite liberal) professors jokingly said that when he first began his distinguished teaching career at Notre Dame, “liberal was a bad word.”

I had then-Professor Barrett as a 1L, during the second semester of Civil Procedure. I did not have her for any other classes. Despite having a semester behind me, I still lived in total fear that I would fail out of law school (because imposter syndrome), and Civ Pro was definitely not my best class. I am certain that Judge Barrett would have no recollection of me, a student of hers in a class of 90 students from 12 years ago, and I had no contact with her after my first year came to a close. All this as context to say that I feel fairly unbiased in my comments.

Personally, Barrett was not my favorite professor. I was fortunate enough to work as a research assistant to the person who undoubtedly was my favorite law professor — a man who taught me about the law, but also gave me life advice and (though he may not know it) shaped my legal career — I would not be where I am today without his guidance and support. Nor did I consider Barrett to be the best teacher I had — that would be the professor for Federal Income Taxation who somehow made Fed Tax entertaining and easy to understand.

But when I really consider what it means to say that Barrett was not my favorite professor, I realize this statement is more of a reflection on how lucky I was during my tenure as a law student (and probably a commentary on how I felt about Civ Pro, which was my least favorite subject). I should also note, of course, that some of my classmates did consider Barrett their favorite/best professor; my 1L year, the graduating class named her Distinguished Professor of the Year, an honor she had earned once before, and then again in her last year as a full professor at Notre Dame. Four hundred fifty of Barrett’s former students signed a letter urging her confirmation to the Seventh Circuit last year (she also had the unanimous support of the Notre Dame Law faculty, and support from law professors at a wide range of institutions).

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Here is what I can say about Judge Barrett. From my perspective as a former student, she is supremely well qualified. Aside from her list of professional qualifications — including graduating at the top of her law school class and clerking for Justice Scalia — I found her to be highly intelligent and always well-prepared for class. And while she must know how smart she is, Professor Barrett appeared to me to be quite modest. She managed to keep tight control of class discussions, never letting us go too far off on a tangent as some other professors were wont to do, and kept gunners in check to ensure that class time wasn’t dominated by one or two students. She had high standards for her students and an expectation that we would come to class prepared, but her questions —while at times difficult and complex — were fair, rather than designed to trap us. She wanted to teach us to think like lawyers. While I was a law student, I was often more focused on learning the substantive law and didn’t fully appreciate the concept of learning to think like a lawyer. It is after a decade of legal practice in which I have spent a good deal of my career on issues like patents and privacy (neither of which were classes I took in law school), that I really embrace the important role that professors have in teaching us how to think and what questions to ask. I found her class to be highly challenging, but her final to be fair; there were no surprises on her exam.

I haven’t retained much from either semester of Civ Pro, but here is an anecdote that I do remember from Professor Barrett’s class. We were studying the dreaded Erie doctrine and Professor Barrett drew a chart on the white board to help explain it. Class ended and several students (myself included) were even more confused by Erie; some went to her office hours to try to get a better understanding. At the next class, Professor Barrett was more than willing to abandon the chart, saying that she had drawn it to try to make the doctrine more understandable and less complex, but that if it wasn’t working, we wouldn’t use it. She took full responsibility for the confusion and was flexible enough to try a new angle.

I don’t understand criticisms of Judge Barrett’s faith. I was offended by Senator Feinstein’s (D-CA) questioning at Barrett’s confirmation hearing, in which my home state senior Senator famously said, “The dogma lives loudly within you, and that’s of concern.” Many, but by no means all, of my professors were practicing Catholics. My law school had a chapel, a priest who taught ethics, masses held in the common areas, and crucifixes in every classroom. It is, after all, a Catholic law school. I had one professor who started every single class with a prayer and another who started with the sign of the cross. Professor Barrett did neither, but simply taught the material at hand. Had I limited my perspective of Professor Barrett to the confines of class, I’m not sure that I would have known that she is Catholic. Nor would I have known anything about her political views.

Feinstein’s line of questioning heavily relied on a law review article co-written by Barrett with Professor John Garvey when she was a law student. How many of us would want something we wrote as a 20-something law student thrown back in our faces decades later? Not to mention that this article seems to say the exact opposite of what many have accused Barrett of — rather than advocating for Catholic teaching to overrule a judge’s commitment to law, it suggests that where Catholic conscience makes it impossible to enforce the law (i.e., sentencing or enforcing jury recommendations in death penalty cases), they should recuse themselves. I read this as a call to ensure that personal beliefs, religious or otherwise, do not compromise a judge’s ability to fairly interpret or enforce the law. For example, this quote from the paper: “Judges cannot—nor should they try to—align our legal system with the Church’s moral teaching whenever the two diverge.”

At the end of the day, here is what I want from any SCOTUS justice: someone with incredible intellect, humanity, thoughtfulness, and judgment. I want someone who is passionate about the law, which I have no doubt that Judge Barrett is; during her address to the 2006 graduating class, she said, “The practice of law is fun. Be prepared to love it. As a young lawyer, I was surprised by how much I did. It is easy to see how, for many lawyers, the practice of law quickly becomes an end in itself, for the satisfaction, prestige or money it brings. Don’t let that happen to you; set your sights higher than that.”[1]

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In a different time, in a less politically charged environment, I have no doubt that a person of Judge Barrett’s qualifications would be confirmed unanimously, or at least near unanimously, as Justices Scalia and Ginsburg were.

[1] If you read her entire address, you will see that she talks about God, prayer, and the Church quite a bit. Remember, of course, that Notre Dame is a Catholic institution.

Krista L. Cox is a policy attorney who has spent her career working for non-profit organizations and associations. She has expertise in copyright, patent, and intellectual property enforcement law, as well as international trade. She currently works for a non-profit member association advocating for balanced copyright. You can reach her at [email protected].

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