Justice Amy Coney Barrett, a mind of her own

Jodi Kantor, How Amy Coney Barrett Is Confounding the Right and the Left, NYTimes, June 17, 2025.

As President Trump was leaning toward appointing Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court five years ago, some advisers shared doubts about whether she was conservative enough. But he waved them away, according to someone familiar with the discussions. He wanted a nominee religious conservatives would applaud, and with an election approaching, he was up against the clock.

Soon after Justice Barrett arrived at the court she began surprising her colleagues. Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. assigned her to write a majority opinion — among her first — allowing the seizure of state property in a pipeline case, according to several people aware of the process. But she then changed her mind and took the opposite stance, a bold move that risked irritating the chief justice.

In another early case, as Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. tried to further his decades-long quest to expand the role of religion in public life, she preferred a more restrained route, setting off a clash in their approaches that continues. And in a key internal vote, she opposed even taking up the case that overturned Roe v. Wade and the federal right to abortion, though she ultimately joined the ruling.

Now Mr. Trump is attacking the judiciary and testing the Constitution, and Justice Barrett, appointed to clinch a 50-year conservative legal revolution, is showing signs of leftward drift.

She has become the Republican-appointed justice most likely to be in the majority in decisions that reach a liberal outcome, according to a new analysis of her record prepared for The New York Times. Her influence — measured by how often she is on the winning side — is rising. Along with the chief justice, a frequent voting partner, Justice Barrett could be one of the few people in the country to check the actions of the president.

Whoops! On presidential power:

“She hasn’t found a team,” said Sarah Isgur, a legal podcast host, pointing to her habit of marking where she departs from conservative colleagues, and to a recent death penalty ruling in which she was sitting “in the middle of that decision.”

But the Trump administration’s conflict with the courts and pushing of constitutional boundaries may force her to take a more decisive stance. Of the three justices at the center of the court, where the most influence lies, she is the only one without a long trail of views on how much power a president should have — the issue at the heart of nearly all these cases.

“She doesn’t have 10 years to mellow into it,” Mr. Feldman said. “Now is the crisis.”

Not at all like Trump:

The ramrod-straight jurist had little in common personally with Mr. Trump. “When I think of Amy, I think of someone deeply devoted to family and faith, who does not seek out the limelight, who is humble and just wants to quietly do the work,” said Amanda Tyler, a law professor at Berkeley, former clerk to Justice Ginsburg and longtime friend to Justice Barrett. To lawmakers, the nominee stressed her independence. Got a confidential news tip?

But the president had already said the justices he appointed would be “automatic” votes to overturn Roe v. Wade. On the public stage, certain facts (her large family and membership in a religious community that had once called women leaders “handmaids”) overshadowed others (when she became a federal judge, every member of her clerkship class, liberals included, endorsed her). Partisans said she stood for their greatest hopes or worst fears. She was confirmed without a single Democratic vote. [...]

So far, Justice Barrett’s record on Trump-related votes is short but suggestive. Usually, justices show what scholars call “appointment bias,” leaning slightly in favor of the presidents who appointed them.

She has gone in the other direction. Because emergency orders are tentative, and not every vote is disclosed, the evidence is limited. But she is the Republican appointee who appears to have voted least often for Mr. Trump’s position, based on three cases decided last year stemming from his attempts to subvert the 2020 election, as well as 14 emergency applications since then arising from his sentencing in New York and recent blitz of executive orders.

There's more at the link.

H/t Tyler Cowen.