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Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett knows how to command an audience.
This was crystallized Monday night at the Swissotel in Chicago, where she spoke for just three minutes to several hundred judges and legal professionals gathered for the Seventh Circuit Judicial Conference.
Her remarks, though short, were optimistic and warm. She urged the courts to keep their sense of “camaraderie and professionalism” despite inevitable, sharp disagreements. This, she said, is “what enables the judicial system to work well.”
Barrett smiled fondly as she remembered her time on the 7th Circuit, where she served for several years prior to her nomination to the Supreme Court. She introduced the next speaker, who took the stage to another standing ovation.
And just as quickly as she entered the packed ballroom, she was gone.
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As the youngest justice on the bench, Barrett’s ideology over her nearly five-term tenure on the Supreme Court has been the subject of furious speculation, and at times, just plain fury.
Conservatives have panned her record as more moderate than that of the late Justice Antonin Scalia, for whom she once clerked. Liberals have been incensed by her reluctance to side more consistently with the court’s left-leaning justices on abortion, federal powers and other seminal cases.
Barrett’s voting record is more moderate than Scalia’s, according to a June New York Times data analysis that found she plays an “increasingly central role” on the court.
Barrett used her time on Monday to implore the group of judges to maintain a sense of grace, decorum, and respect for colleagues, despite the inevitable, heated disagreements that will occur.
The warm, if somewhat lofty, sense of idealism on display is one that is expected to be echoed further in her forthcoming memoir, “Listening to the Law: Reflections on the Court and Constitution,” slated for publication next month.
The theme of Monday’s remarks, to the extent there was one, stressed working toward common goals, accepting ideological differences and embracing disagreement while keeping a broader perspective — a point echoed by Barrett and earlier speakers, who cited David Brooks repeatedly in praising purpose-driven public service.
The upside of so many hours spent in disagreement, Barrett said, is learning how to strike that balance.
“We know how to argue well,” she said. “We also know how to argue without letting it consume relationships.”
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This has been especially true during Trump’s second term, as the Supreme Court presided over a record blitz of emergency appeals and orders filed by the administration and other aggrieved parties in response to the hundreds of executive orders signed in his first months in office.
The high court has ruled in Trump’s favor in the majority of emergency applications, allowing the administration to proceed with its ban on transgender service members in the military, its termination of millions of dollars in Education Department grants and its firing of probationary employees across the federal government, among many other actions.
Even so, it is Barrett who has emerged as the most-talked-about justice on the high court this term, confounding and frustrating observers as they tried and failed to predict how she would vote.
She’s been hailed as the “most interesting justice on the bench,” a “trailblazer,” and an iconoclast, among other things.
But on Monday, she stressed that the commonalities among judges, both for the 7th Circuit and beyond, are far greater than what issues divide them.
As for her own work, Barrett offered few details — her remarks began and ended in less time than it takes to microwave a burrito.
It’s unclear if, or to what extent, Barrett’s schedule may have changed at the eleventh hour — a reflection of the many demands placed on sitting Supreme Court justices, whose schedules are often subject to change or cancellation at a moment’s notice.
The 7th Circuit did not immediately respond to Fox News’s questions as to what, if anything, had changed on Barrett’s end.
Questions swirled as she exited. Had she planned longer remarks? Was the agenda misread? Or is she saving details for her memoir and looming book tour, as one reporter suggested?
Her appearance, full of irony, left observers with more questions than answers. Whether she addresses them in the weeks ahead remains to be seen.
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