Amy Coney Barrett

Amy Coney Barrett joined the Supreme Court in October 2020, succeeding Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. She was born on January 28, 1972, in New Orleans, Louisiana, the oldest of seven children, and grew up in suburban Metairie. She graduated from Rhodes College in Memphis in 1994 and summa cum laude from Notre Dame Law School in 1997. She clerked for Judge Laurence Silberman of the D.C. Circuit and then for Justice Antonin Scalia, whose originalist approach to the Constitution she has cited as an influence on her own. After a short period in private practice in Washington, she returned to Notre Dame in 2002 as a member of the law faculty.

At Notre Dame, Barrett taught and wrote about constitutional law, federal courts, and statutory interpretation for 15 years. President Donald Trump appointed her to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit in 2017. Ginsburg died on September 18, 2020, and Trump nominated Barrett eight days later. Senate Republicans moved quickly to fill the seat before the presidential election, while Democrats argued that the winner of the election should choose the nominee, citing the Senate's refusal to consider Merrick Garland in 2016. The Senate confirmed Barrett 52 to 48 on October 26, 2020, about a week before Election Day. She was the fifth woman to serve on the Court and, at 48, its youngest member at the time.

Barrett is part of the Court's conservative majority and is often noted for close attention to the limits of judicial power. She wrote the majority opinion in Murthy v. Missouri (2024), which held that two states and several social media users who accused federal officials of pressuring platforms to remove posts lacked standing to sue, and in Trump v. CASA (2025), which held that federal courts generally may not issue universal injunctions blocking a government policy nationwide. She joined the majority in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization (2022). She and her husband, Jesse, have seven children, two of them adopted from Haiti. In 2025 she published Listening to the Law, a book about her work as a judge.