Steve shared his recent Slate piece called “Amy Coney Barrett Somehow Managed to Get the Law and the Bible Wrong in Her New Book.” (I imagine Prawfsblawg readers know that Justice Barrett is a personal friend and was my longtime colleague.) I realize that authors don’t pick headlines and titles, generally, and understand that this kind of snark is catnip for Slate readers. But, of course, nothing in Steve’s piece identifies any “law” that Justice Barrett “get[s] . . . wrong”. It is not “wrong” for an appellate judge to think that appellate judges should “resolve disputes according to the ground rules that the people have prescribed” and, contrary to Steve’s suggestion, nothing about that statement casts any doubt on the importance of factfinding, testing evidence, etc.
He suggests further that Justice Barrett’s alleged mistakes have something to do with her having been a professor, rather than a trial lawyer, and reports that “Ketanji Brown Jackson, a former public defender, would not have made the same mistake.” It is no criticism of Justice Jackson (with whom I worked for a little while at the Miller,Cassidy firm, where Justice Barrett also worked) to note that (a) Justice Barrett taught evidence for more than a decade and (b) Justice Jackson was an appellate lawyer when she was at the public defender’s office.
As for getting the Bible wrong, well, I’m a Roman Catholic, and so I’m comfortable with the notion that private persons’ readings of Scripture can be mistaken. Whether the mistake is Steve’s or Justice Barrett’s, I’ll leave to the relevant authorities. But, Steve’s conclusion that “Barrett offers a misreading of King Solomon as a strategic foil for her idealized American judge” seems to claim a bit more interpretive authority, and a bit more insight into the justice’s motives, than I would have thought law professors enjoy.
Posted by Rick Garnett on September 8, 2025 at 10:56 AM