"To understand how grudging Amy Coney Barrett's new book is when it comes to revealing personal details, consider that one of the family members the Supreme Court Justice most often refers to is a great-grandmother who died five years before she was born. On Barrett's desk at home, she recounts in " Listening to the Law," she keeps a photograph of her great-grandmother's one-story house, where, as a widow during the Great Depression, she raised some of her thirteen children and took in other needy relatives."
"This is what passes for disclosure from Barrett; she measures out the details of her life with coffee spoons, careful not to spill. You can almost hear the Justice's editor pleading for something-anything-more in return for a reported two-million-dollar advance. Instead, Barrett, the last of Donald Trump's three first-term nominees, dispenses with biography in a single, brisk chapter. Of her upbringing in New Orleans, where her Catholic family belonged to a faith community called People of Praise, we learn nothing—not even her parents' occupations."
Several Supreme Court Justices maintain private, tightly controlled personal lives while embracing a public posture of judicial restraint. Personal details and family backgrounds are minimized to project moral seriousness and impartiality. The restrained demeanor coexists with originalist legal strategies and limited-role rhetoric that enable sweeping conservative doctrinal shifts. Those shifts affect administrative power, reproductive rights, and federal authority, producing consequential changes in law and governance. The contrast between personal reticence and transformative legal outcomes reveals how restrained presentation can accompany ambitious institutional change.
Read at The New Yorker
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