Notre Dame profs push back on Amy Coney Barrett portrayals: Not just 'an ideological category'

Sep. 23--SOUTH BEND -- When Amy Coney Barrett's colleagues at the University of Notre Dame Law School learned of her nomination for a federal appeals court seat in 2017, they began signing a letter of support for her confirmation.

The letter began circulating on a Thursday, recalled professor Stephen Yelderman, who was traveling and could not immediately sign it. When Yelderman returned to the office after the weekend, his colleagues were quick to approach him.

"Before I can get to my office, four people come up to me, one after another, and they're like, 'You're the only person who hasn't signed her letter,'" Yelderman said. "All these signatures were collected in barely one day."

The story, Yelderman says, illustrates Barrett's reputation among her fellow academics.

Now, with Barrett, 48, a leading candidate to become a U.S. Supreme Court nominee, her fellow professors will be glued to the news this week, with President Donald Trump set to announce his choice Saturday. They say they are wary of one-dimensional portraits of Barrett, especially those laser-focused on her religious beliefs and where she stands on abortion rights.

"If she's being considered by a Republican administration, that means they think she's going to be more conservative," said Paolo Carozza, a Notre Dame law professor and director of the Kellogg Institute for International Studies. "But people are reducing Amy to an ideological category instead of taking her for who she is: an intelligent, thoughtful, open-minded person."

For Yelderman, it would be his second time in three years watching a judge he knows face scrutiny. He knew Justice Neil Gorsuch for 10 years before Gorsuch was confirmed in 2017, and he clerked for the justice last year.

"When there's someone you hold in high regard, it's a little bit terrifying knowing what is coming in the course of a modern confirmation fight, regardless of how high their character is," Yelderman said.

Yelderman's bottom-line assessment is clear: "She's mind-blowingly intelligent, and she's also one of the most humble people you're going to meet. Judge Barrett is the complete package."

There's little doubt about Barrett's popularity among her Notre Dame colleagues and students, who have voted her three times as professor of the year. A 1997 graduate of the law school, Barrett was recruited back in 2002 to join the faculty. She has continued teaching since being confirmed to the 7th Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals in 2017.

Religious conservatives have embraced the potential nomination of Barrett, a staunch Catholic, as they predict a solid conservative voting record.

Critics on the political left, meanwhile, are sounding alarm bells about what they see as a far-right ideologue who would help undo causes such as abortion rights. They have also pointed to her affiliation with People of Praise, a charismatic Christian group that has drawn scrutiny for using the title "handmaiden" to describe its female leaders and for influencing the personal lives of its members. Leaders of the group say they have been mischaracterized and that they mostly function as a support network, denying any influence over the decisions of members in positions of power.

Groups such as the Human Rights Campaign have mobilized to oppose Barrett's confirmation. In a statement Tuesday, the group declared Barrett an "absolute threat to LGBTQ rights" and said her "history tells a story of anti-LGBTQ ideology, opposing basic rights thought to be settled law, and an anti-choice ideology out of step with popular opinion."

On the issue of faith and public criticism, Barrett last year referenced the example set by former Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, for whom she once clerked. At an event hosted by the Notre Dame Club of Washington, D.C., in 2019, Barrett was asked what she had learned from Scalia. She responded by saying Scalia "always was who he was."

"He was a man of faith, he was a family man. He had a large family," she responded. "He took a lot of criticism from many quarters for the values that he had and the choices that he made, his Catholicism and his faith. He had the strength to be who he was."

Barrett, the oldest of seven children, now has a large family herself, with she and her husband, Jesse, raising seven children in South Bend, including two adopted from Haiti. She told the audience in Washington that she and Jesse, whom she met in law school, were influenced during their marriage preparations by a young couple they met who had adopted a special needs child, and later by another young couple who had adopted a child from Russia.

"What greater thing can you do than raise children?" she told the audience in Washington. "That's where you have your greatest impact on the world."

A friend of Barrett, Wendy Angst, offered a glimpse into the judge's personal life in a 2018 interview with the South Bend Tribune, describing a daily routine in which Barrett rises between 4 and 5 a.m., exercises, then gives her youngest son, Ben, a piggyback ride down the stairs.

At Notre Dame, professors and students say they have not seen evidence of Barrett's faith and beliefs intruding into her teaching; they speak instead of her work to encourage debate and push students to reach their own conclusions.

One of Barrett's former students, Krista Cox, said she found Barrett to be "immensely fair" when she attended law school about 15 years ago.

Cox said she knows Barrett's writings show the judge is an "originalist" who believes in strictly adhering to the intent of the American founders who wrote the Constitution. But Cox said that "wasn't how I viewed her" in class.

"I don't think she was one to let her own political ideology or Catholicism tint or change the way she approached the law," Cox said. "My interactions with her in the classroom are just that she was a brilliant legal mind, but she didn't try to persuade someone to the correct political way to view this."

Carozza, the fellow law professor, acknowledged judges do not make it onto short lists of potential Supreme Court nominees without attracting the attention of politicians. But he says Barrett has spent years, from clerking for federal judges to her work at Notre Dame and on the bench, confronting the "most important legal and constitutional questions that are current and relevant to the Supreme Court."

And he pointed out the fact Barrett has never held an overtly political job in a presidential administration, unlike justices Elena Kagan and Brett Kavanaugh.

"It suggests an even higher regard for her than just being politically aligned," Carozza said. "She has not been a political activist."

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