Amy Coney Barrett

Amy Vivian Coney Barrett (born January 28, 1972) is an American lawyer and jurist who serves as an associate justice of the Supreme Court of the United States.

Amy Vivian Coney was born in 1972 in New Orleans, Louisiana, to Linda (née Vath) and Michael Coney.

The eldest of seven children, she has five sisters and a brother.

Her father worked as an attorney for Shell Oil Company, and her mother was a high school French teacher and homemaker.

Barrett has Irish and French ancestry.

Her maternal ancestors were from Ballyconnell, County Cavan, Ireland, while there is also Irish lineage among her father's ancestors.

Her great-great-grandparents emigrated from France to New Orleans.

Her family is devoutly Catholic, and her father is an ordained deacon at St. Catherine of Siena Parish in Metairie, Louisiana, where she grew up.

Barrett attended St. Mary's Dominican High School, an all-girls Roman Catholic high school in New Orleans.

She was student body vice president of the school and graduated in 1990.

After high school, Barrett attended Rhodes College in Memphis, Tennessee, where she majored in English literature and minored in French.

She considers herself "somewhat fluent" in French, but with a Louisiana accent.

Barrett graduated in 1994 with a Bachelor of Arts, magna cum laude, and was inducted into Omicron Delta Kappa and Phi Beta Kappa.

In her graduating class, she was named most outstanding English department graduate.

Barrett then attended Notre Dame Law School on a full-tuition scholarship.

Barrett graduated from Rhodes College before attending Notre Dame Law School, earning a J.D. with distinction in 1997.

She then clerked for Judge Laurence Silberman and Justice Antonin Scalia.

She was an executive editor of the Notre Dame Law Review and graduated in 1997 ranked first in her class with a Juris Doctor, summa cum laude.

Barrett spent two years as a judicial law clerk after law school, first for Judge Laurence Silberman of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit from 1997 to 1998, and then for Justice Antonin Scalia of the U.S. Supreme Court from 1998 to 1999.

From 1999 to 2002, Barrett practiced law at Miller Cassidy Larroca & Lewin, a boutique law firm for litigation in Washington, D.C., that merged with the Houston, Texas-based law firm Baker Botts in 2001.

While at Baker Botts, she worked on Bush v. Gore, the lawsuit that grew out of the 2000 United States presidential election, providing research and briefing assistance for the firm's representation of George W. Bush.

In 2001, Barrett was a visiting associate professor and John M. Olin Fellow in Law at George Washington University Law School.

In 2002, Barrett joined the faculty at Notre Dame Law School, becoming a professor in 2010.

While serving on the federal bench, she has continued to teach civil procedure, constitutional law, and statutory interpretation.

In 2002, she joined the faculty of her alma mater, Notre Dame Law School.

At Notre Dame, she taught federal courts, evidence, constitutional law, and statutory interpretation.

In 2007, she was a visiting professor at the University of Virginia School of Law.

Barrett was named a professor of law at Notre Dame in 2010, and from 2014 to 2017 held Notre Dame's Diane and M.O. Miller II Research Chair of Law.

Her scholarship focused on constitutional law, originalism, statutory interpretation, and stare decisis.

Her academic work has been published in the Columbia, Cornell, Virginia, Notre Dame, and Texas law reviews.

At Notre Dame, Barrett received the "Distinguished Professor of the Year" award three times.

From 2011 to 2016, she spoke on constitutional law at Blackstone Legal Fellowship, a summer program for law school students that the Alliance Defending Freedom established to inspire a "distinctly Christian worldview in every area of law".

While serving on the Seventh Circuit, Barrett commuted between Chicago and South Bend, continuing to teach courses on statutory interpretation and constitutional theory.

Barrett was a U.S. circuit judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit from 2017 to 2020.

The fifth woman to serve on the court, she was nominated by President Donald Trump and has served since October 27, 2020.

On September 26, 2020, Trump nominated Barrett to succeed Ruth Bader Ginsburg on the Supreme Court of the United States.

Her nomination was controversial because the 2020 presidential election was only 38 days away and Senate Republicans had refused to hold hearings for Merrick Garland during an election year in 2016.

The next month, the U.S. Senate voted 52–48 to confirm her nomination, with all Democrats and one Republican in opposition.

Described as a protégée of Justice Antonin Scalia, Barrett supports textualism in statutory interpretation and originalism in constitutional interpretation.

She is generally considered to be among the Court's conservative bloc.