With just a few days left before President Trump announces his Supreme Court pick, the only woman among the three finalists has come under particular scrutiny. Indiana’s Amy Coney Barrett, a federal judge on the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals, has been falsely called a racist and a cult member in a single news cycle. With certain aspects of Judge Barrett’s history already picked over, there’s one profoundly revealing part of her past that supporters and detractors have paid less attention to—the thing she’s spent a significant chunk of her professional life doing: teaching. Until her confirmation to the federal court last year, Barrett taught at her alma mater Notre Dame Law School.
Several former students and colleagues—a number of whom called THE WEEKLY STANDARD to praise her off the record, due to their professional proximity to the administration and Supreme Court—describe an uncommonly compassionate and uniformly challenging professor. Students, being familiar with her scholarship and lectures, knew her to be a consistent textualist and originalist. But in teaching statutory interpretation, civil procedure, evidence, among other fields of law, she never privileged the arguments students assumed she agreed with, they say. And she brought to her teaching a human touch that made her an influential mentor in matters of law and life alike.
One former student, who spoke anonymously because her work as a congressional staffer intersects with the politics of SCOTUS confirmation, said Barrett was one reason she stayed at Notre Dame Law School when tempting opportunities called her to D.C. “She’s the smartest professor I’ve ever had,” she said, “and I’ve had a lot of smart professors. But she made herself available, and was always approachable.”
She recalls telling her father that Barrett, as the mother of seven children, was a role model in more ways than one. “The fact that she was able to have young children, adopted children of the same age, and be a full time professor—that’s completely inspirational to me.”
Today, “I’m a mother of two children,” she added, “and it’s not easy at all.” The buzz among former Barrett students in D.C. politics at the time of her controversial confirmation hearing last year, she said, was that Democrats knew she’d soon be an clear front-runner for the highest court. “You look at the other women on the court—two of them don’t have children. Without judgment, I can’t relate to that.”
Another recent law school graduate, Zachary Gordon, who’s now an attorney in Las Vegas, had Barrett for evidence and civil procedure. Without embellishment, he told TWS via email, “She is the best teacher I have ever had (law school or otherwise).”
Barrett’s seminars were tight-knit groups, one former student recalled, in part because her innate compassion and rigorous engagement with students’ ideas. “Given a non-textualist or non-originalist argument, her interventions would be remarkably fair-minded and smart,” Wisconsin lawyer Rob Driscoll said.
And were she and a student in philosophical agreement, “She’d be really good at finding the flaw,” he added, describing her intellect as laser-like. In an especially rigorous and formative statutory interpretation class, he said, she never eased up on students one might expect her to find ideological sympathy with. “She wanted every argument to be as strong as possible.”
Her teaching style attests to judicial and intellectual fortitude. But for Driscoll her mentorship meant something more as well. In his second year of law school, he missed multiple weeks of class due to a family tragedy. He was in Judge Barrett’s evidence class at the time, and when he returned to school, what he thought would be a cursory talk with her about the work he’d missed, “turned into a person discussion I still think about,” Driscoll said. “We talked about faith and family.”
“Whenever things have been tough, I think back on that conversation. It’s hard to describe in words what that conversation meant to me,” he added. “That’s just the type of person she is.” She’s a great mentor, he said, “In terms of time, advice, and frankly serving as an example.”
Jeff Pojanowski, a Notre Dame law professor whom Barrett hired in 2010, echoed these assessments. Her fair-mindedness would serve her well on the Supreme Court, he said. But when asked about her, his personal memories of her impact on his life came up first. “I was at Politics and Prose giving my two-month-old a bottle when she called,” to tell him he’d got the interview, he recalled.
“She has an excellent capacity to engage with the contours of ideas she doesn’t necessarily agree with,” he added, of her contributions to faculty conferences. More personally, he remembered a time she transformed his work in a single informal session: While working on a paper he’d confined to a narrow topic, “I had coffee with her, and she said, What you’re really talking about is a bigger issue. Expand it, tilt it 20 degrees.”
“As a colleague, she could see right off the bat what the nugget of interesting information I had,” Pojanowski said, comparing her economy of thought to that of Justice Roberts, for whom he clerked. Hers is a powerful intellect suited to the topmost bench, he said—and as a Supreme Court justice, she would likewise identify an case’s deeper meaning and consequences with clarity and expediency.
