Amy Coney Barrett
Born Name: Amy Vivian Coney
Date of Birth: January 28, 1972
Place of Birth: New Orleans, Louisiana, United States
Spouse(s): Jesse M. Barrett (m. 1999)
Children: 7
Siblings: Michael Coney
Parents: Linda Coney, Michael Coney
Education: Rhodes College (BA), University of Notre Dame (JD)
Nationality: American
Academic background
Academic work
Institutions: Notre Dame Law School

Amy Coney Barrett (born Amy Vivian Coney; January 28, 1972) is an American attorney, jurist, and academic who serves as a circuit judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit.

President Donald Trump nominated Barrett to the Seventh Circuit on May 8, 2017, and the Senate confirmed her on October 31, 2017. Before and while serving on the federal bench, she has been a professor of law at Notre Dame Law School, where she has taught civil procedure, constitutional law, and statutory interpretation.

Eleven months after her confirmation to the Seventh Circuit, Barrett was added to Trump's list of potential Supreme Court nominees. On September 26, 2020, Trump nominated Barrett to succeed Ruth Bader Ginsburg on the United States Supreme Court.

Early life and education
Barrett was born Amy Vivian Coney on January 28, 1972, in New Orleans, Louisiana. She is the eldest of seven children, with five sisters and a brother. Her father, Michael Coney, worked as an attorney for Shell Oil Company and her mother, Linda, was a high school French teacher and homemaker. Her family were devout Catholics, and her father has been an ordained deacon since 1982. Barrett grew up in Metairie, a suburb of New Orleans. She attended St. Mary's Dominican High School, an all-girls Roman Catholic high school, from which she graduated in 1990. She was student body vice-president in high school.

After high school, Coney attended Rhodes College on a scholarship, where she majored in English literature and minored in French. She graduated in 1994 with a Bachelor of Arts magna cum laude and was inducted into Omicron Delta Kappa and Phi Beta Kappa. In her graduating class, she was named most outstanding English department graduate. She then studied law at the Notre Dame Law School on a full-tuition scholarship. She was an executive editor of the Notre Dame Law Review and graduated first in her class in 1997 with a Juris Doctor summa cum laude.

Career
Clerkships and private practice
Coney spent two years as a judicial law clerk after law school, first for Judge Laurence Silberman of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit from 1997 to 1998, then for Justice Antonin Scalia of the U.S. Supreme Court from 1998 to 1999.

From 1999 to 2002, going by the surname Coney-Barrett, she practiced law at Miller, Cassidy, Larroca & Lewin, a boutique law firm for litigation in Washington, D.C., that merged with the Houston, Texas-based law firm Baker Botts in 2001. While at Baker Botts, she worked on Bush v. Gore, the lawsuit that grew out of the 2000 United States presidential election, providing research and briefing assistance for Baker Botts's representation of George W. Bush.

Teaching and scholarship
Barrett served as a visiting associate professor and John M. Olin Fellow in Law at George Washington University Law School for a year before returning to her alma mater, Notre Dame Law School, in 2002. At Notre Dame she taught federal courts, constitutional law, and statutory interpretation. In 2007, she was a visiting professor at the University of Virginia School of Law. Barrett was named a Professor of Law in 2010, and from 2014 to 2017 held the Diane and M.O. Miller Research Chair of Law. Her scholarship focused on constitutional law, originalism, statutory interpretation, and stare decisis. Her academic work has been published in the Columbia, Cornell, Virginia, Notre Dame, and Texas law reviews.

At Notre Dame, Barrett received the "Distinguished Professor of the Year" award three times. From 2011 to 2016, she spoke on constitutional law at Blackstone Legal Fellowship, a summer training program for Christian law school students that the Alliance Defending Freedom established for the stated purpose of inspiring "distinctly Christian worldview in every area of law." While serving on the Seventh Circuit, Barrett commuted between Chicago and South Bend, continuing to teach a course on statutory interpretation and one on constitutional theory.

From 2010 to 2016, Barrett served by appointment of Chief Justice John Roberts on the Advisory Committee for the Federal Rules of Appellate Procedure.

Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit
Nomination and confirmation
On May 8, 2017, President Donald Trump nominated Barrett to the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit after Judge John Daniel Tinder took senior status. A Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on her nomination was held on September 6, 2017. During the hearing, Senator Dianne Feinstein questioned Barrett about a law review article Barrett co-wrote in 1998 with Professor John H. Garvey in which they argued that Catholic judges should in some cases recuse themselves from death penalty cases due to their moral objections to the death penalty. Asked to "elaborate on the statements and discuss how you view the issue of faith versus fulfilling the responsibility as a judge today," Barrett said that she had participated in many death-penalty appeals while serving as law clerk to Scalia, adding, "My personal church affiliation or my religious belief would not bear on the discharge of my duties as a judge" and "It is never appropriate for a judge to impose that judge's personal convictions, whether they arise from faith or anywhere else, on the law." Barrett emphasized that the article was written in her third year in law school and that she was "very much the junior partner in our collaboration." Worried that Barrett would not uphold Roe v. Wade given her Catholic beliefs, Feinstein followed Barrett's response by saying, "the dogma lives loudly within you, and that is a concern."

The hearing made Barrett popular with religious conservatives. Feinstein's and other senators' questioning was criticized by some Republicans and other observers, such as university presidents John I. Jenkins and Christopher Eisgruber, as an improper inquiry into a nominee's religious belief that employed an unconstitutional "religious test" for office; others, such as Nan Aron, defended Feinstein's line of questioning.

Lambda Legal, an LGBT civil rights organization, co-signed a letter with 26 other gay rights organizations opposing Barrett's nomination. The letter expressed doubts about her ability to separate faith from her rulings on LGBT matters. During her Senate hearing, Barrett was questioned about landmark LGBTQ legal precedents such as Obergefell v. Hodges, United States v. Windsor, and Lawrence v. Texas. She said these cases are "binding precedents" that she intended to "faithfully follow if confirmed" to the appeals court, as required by law. The letter Lambda Legal co-signed read, "Simply repeating that she would be bound by Supreme Court precedent does not illuminate—indeed, it obfuscates—how Professor Barrett would interpret and apply precedent when faced with the sorts of dilemmas that, in her view, 'put Catholic judges in a bind.'" In 2015, Barrett signed a letter to the Synod on the Family affirming the Catholic Church's teaching that "marriage and family [are] founded on the indissoluble commitment of a man and a woman".

Barrett's nomination was supported by every law clerk she had worked with and all of her 49 faculty colleagues at Notre Dame Law school. 450 former students signed a letter to the Senate Judiciary Committee supporting her nomination.

On October 5, 2017, the Senate Judiciary Committee voted 11–9 on party lines to recommend Barrett and report her nomination to the full Senate. On October 30, the Senate invoked cloture by a vote of 54–42. It confirmed her by a vote of 55–43 on October 31, with three Democrats—Joe Donnelly, Tim Kaine, and Joe Manchin—voting for her. She received her commission two days later. Barrett is the first and only woman to occupy an Indiana seat on the Seventh Circuit.

Selected cases
On the Seventh Circuit, Barrett wrote 79 majority opinions (including two that were amended and one that was withdrawn on rehearing), four concurring opinions (one a per curiam opinion), and six dissenting opinions (six published and one in an unpublished order).

Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972
In June 2019, the court, in a unanimous decision written by Barrett, reinstated a suit brought by a male Purdue University student (John Doe) who had been found guilty of sexual assault by Purdue University, which resulted in a one-year suspension, loss of his Navy ROTC scholarship, and expulsion from the ROTC affecting his ability to pursue his chosen career in the Navy. Doe alleged the school's Advisory Committee on Equity discriminated against him on the basis of his sex and violated his rights to due process by not interviewing the alleged victim, not allowing him to present evidence in his defense, including an erroneous statement that he confessed to some of the alleged assault, and appearing to believe the victim instead of the accused without hearing from either party or having even read the investigation report. The court found that Doe had adequately alleged that the university deprived him of his occupational liberty without due process in violation of the Fourteenth Amendment and had violated his Title IX rights "by imposing a punishment infected by sex bias", and remanded to the District Court for further proceedings.

Employment discrimination
In 2017, the Seventh Circuit had rejected the federal government's appeal in a civil lawsuit against AutoZone; the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission argued that AutoZone's assignment of employees to different stores based on race (e.g., "sending African American employees to stores in heavily African American neighborhoods") violated Title VII of the Civil Rights Act. Following this, Barrett joined the court in time to receive a petition for rehearing en banc. Three judges—Chief Judge Diane Wood and Judges Ilana Rovner and David Hamilton—voted to grant rehearing, and criticized the three-judge panel's opinion as upholding a "separate-but-equal arrangement". Barrett did not join the panel opinion, but voted with four judges to deny the petition to rehear the case. The petition was unsuccessful by a 5-3 decision.

Immigration
In June 2020, Barrett wrote a 40-page dissent when the majority upheld a preliminary injunction against the Trump administration's controversial "public charge rule", which heightened the standard for obtaining a green card. In her dissent, she argued that any noncitizens who disenrolled from government benefits because of the rule did so due to confusion about the rule itself rather than from its application, writing that the vast majority of the people subject to the rule are not eligible for government benefits in the first place. On the merits, Barrett departed from her colleagues Wood and Rovner, who held that DHS's interpretation of that provision was unreasonable under Chevron Step Two. Barrett would have held that the new rule fell within the broad scope of discretion granted to the Executive by Congress through the Immigration and Nationality Act. The public charge issue is the subject of a circuit split.

In May 2019, the court rejected a Yemeni citizen and her U.S. citizen husband's challenge to a consular officer's decision to twice deny her visa application under the Immigration and Nationality Act. The U.S. citizen, argued that this had deprived him of a constitutional right to live in the United States with his spouse. In a 2-1 majority opinion authored by Barrett, the court held that the plaintiff's claim was properly dismissed under the doctrine of consular nonreviewability. Barrett declined to address whether the husband had been denied a constitutional right (or whether the constitutional right to live in the United States with his spouse existed at all) because the consular officer's decision to deny Ahmad's visa application was facially legitimate and bona fide, and under Supreme Court precedent, in such a case courts will not "look behind the exercise of that discretion". The dispute concerned what it takes to satisfy this standard. Yafai's subsequent petition for rehearing en banc was denied, with Chief Judge Wood, joined by Judges Rovner and Hamilton, dissenting. Barrett wrote a rare opinion concurring in the denial of rehearing en banc (joined by Judge Joel Flaum).

Abortion-related cases
Barrett has never ruled directly on abortion, but she did vote to rehear a successful challenge to Indiana's parental notification law in 2019. In 2018, she voted against striking down another Indiana law requiring burial or cremation of fetal remains. In both cases, Barrett voted with the minority. The Supreme Court later reinstated the fetal remains law, and in July 2020 it ordered a rehearing in the parental notification case.

In February 2019, Barrett joined a unanimous panel decision upholding a Chicago "bubble ordinance" that prohibits approaching within a certain distance of an abortion clinic or its patrons without consent. Citing the Supreme Court's buffer zone decision in Hill v. Colorado, the court rejected the plaintiffs' challenge to the ordinance on First Amendment grounds.

Second Amendment
In March 2019, Barrett dissented when the court upheld a law prohibiting felons from possessing firearms. The majority rejected the as-applied challenge raised by the plaintiff, who had a nonviolent felony conviction for mail fraud, and upheld the felony dispossession statute as "substantially related to an important government interest in preventing gun violence." In her dissent, Barrett argued that while the government has a legitimate interest in denying gun possession to felons convicted of violent crimes, there is no evidence that denying guns to nonviolent felons promotes this interest, and that the law violates the Second Amendment.

Fourth Amendment
In August 2018, Barrett wrote for the unanimous panel when it determined that the police had lacked probable cause to search a vehicle based solely upon an anonymous tip that people were "playing with guns" because no crime had been alleged. Barrett distinguished Navarette v. California and wrote, "the police were right to respond to the anonymous call by coming to the parking lot to determine what was happening. But determining what was happening and immediately seizing people upon arrival are two different things, and the latter was premature...Watson's case presents a close call. But this one falls on the wrong side of the Fourth Amendment."

February 2019, Barrett wrote for the unanimous panel when it found that police officers had been unreasonable to assume "that a woman who answers the door in a bathrobe has authority to consent to a search of a male suspect's residence." Therefore, the district court should have granted the defendant's motion to suppress evidence found in the residence as the fruit of an unconstitutional search.

Qualified immunity
In January 2019, Barrett wrote for the unanimous panel when it denied qualified immunity to a civil lawsuit sought by a defendant who as a homicide detective had knowingly provided false and misleading information in the probable cause affidavit that was used to obtain an arrest warrant for the plaintiff. (The charges were later dropped and the plaintiff was released.) The court found the defendant's lies and omissions violated "clearly established law" and the plaintiff's Fourth Amendment rights and thus the detective was not shielded by qualified immunity.

In Howard v. Koeller (7th Cir. 2018), in an unsigned order by a three-judge panel that included Barrett, the court found that qualified immunity did not protect a prison officer who had labeled a prisoner a "snitch" and thereby exposed him to risk from his fellow inmates.

Environment
In Orchard Hill Building Co. v. U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, 893 F.3d 1017 (7th Cir. 2018), Barrett joined a unanimous panel decision, written by Judge Amy J. St. Eve, in a case brought by a property developer challenging the Corps' determination that a wetland 11 mi (18 km) from the nearest navigable river was among the "waters of the United States." The court found that the Corps had not provided substantial evidence of a significant nexus to navigable‐in‐fact waters and remanded. As a result, the property was not protected from development under the Clean Water Act.

Consumer protection
In Dalton v. Teva North America, 891 F.3d 687 (7th Cir. 2018), a patient sued Teva Pharmaceuticals after her IUD broke during removal with a piece remaining in her uterus. Her doctor said she now required a hysterectomy. A district court found in the manufacturer's favor. The Seventh Circuit affirmed; in an opinion for a unanimous panel, Barrett cited the lack of expert testimony to support plaintiff's contention of a defect in the IUD, writing, "the issue of causation in her case is not obvious."

Coronavirus measures
In early September 2020, Barrett joined Wood's opinion upholding the district court's denial of the Illinois Republican Party's request for a preliminary injunction to block Governor J. B. Pritzker's COVID-19 orders.

Civil procedure and standing
In Casillas v. Madison Ave. Associates, Inc., 926 F.3d 329 (7th Cir. 2019), the plaintiff brought a class-action lawsuit against Madison Avenue, alleging that the company violated the Fair Debt Collection Practices Act (FDCPA) when it sent her a debt-collection letter that described the FDCPA process for verifying a debt but failed to specify in the letter that she was required to respond in writing to trigger the FDCPA protections. Casillas did not allege that she had tried to verify her debt and trigger the statutory protections under the FDCPA, or that the amount owed was in any doubt. In a decision written by Barrett, the panel, citing the Supreme Court's decision in Spokeo, Inc. v. Robins, found that the plaintiff's allegation of receiving incorrect or incomplete information was only a "bare procedural violation" that was insufficiently concrete to satisfy the Article III's injury-in-fact requirement. Wood dissented from the denial of rehearing en banc. The issue created a circuit split.

In Shakman v. Clerk of the Circuit Court of Cook County, 969 F.3d 810 (7th Cir. 2020), the court held, in a decision written by Barrett and joined by the other two members of the panel, that a Teamsters local did not have standing to appeal an order in the Shakman case because it was not formally a party to the case. The union had not intervened in the action, but rather merely submitted a memorandum in the district court opposing a motion, which the Seventh Circuit determined was insufficient to give the union a right to appeal.

Judicial philosophy, political views, speeches, and writings
Barrett is a constitutional scholar with expertise in statutory interpretation.

Textualism and originalism
Barrett is a textualist and an originalist (of the original-public-meaning, rather than original-intent, variety). According to Barrett, "Originalism is characterized by a commitment to two core principles. First, the meaning of the constitutional text is fixed at the time of its ratification. Second, the historical meaning of the text 'has legal significance and is authoritative in most circumstances.'" For the purpose of "describing the disagreement between originalists and nonoriginalists about the authoritativeness of the original public meaning," she refers to a section of a law review article by Keith E. Whittington, titled Originalism: A Critical Introduction, where it is said: "Critics of originalism have suggested a range of considerations that might trump original meaning if the two were to come into conflict. From this perspective, fidelity to original meaning is not the chief goal of constitutional theory. ...Confronted with suitably unpleasant results, the nonoriginalist might posit that the original meaning should be sacrificed. Alternatively, we might think that contemporary public opinion should trump original meaning. ...Underlying all these considerations is a view that courts are authorized to impose constitutional rules other than those adopted by the constitutional drafters. ...the originalist must insist that judges not close their eyes to the discoverable meaning of the Constitution and announce some other constitutional rule to supersede it. It is at that point that the originalist and the nonoriginalist must part ways."

Textualism, Barrett says, requires that judges construe statutory language consistent with its "ordinary meaning": "The law is comprised of words—and textualists emphasize that words mean what they say, not what a judge thinks that they ought to say." According to Barrett, "Textualism stands in contrast to purposivism, a method of statutory interpretation that was dominant through much of the 20th century." If a court concludes that statutory language appears to be in tension with a statute's overarching goal, "purposivists argue that a judge should go with the goal rather than the text". For Barrett, textualism is not literalism, nor is it about rigid dictionary definitions. "It is about identifying the plain communicative content of the words".

Barrett clerked for Justice Antonin Scalia, and has spoken and written of her admiration of his adherence to the text of statutes and to originalism, writing: "His judicial philosophy is mine, too. A judge must apply the law as written. Judges are not policymakers, and they must be resolute in setting aside any policy views they may hold." In one article she quoted Justice Scalia concerning the importance of the original meaning of the Constitution: "The validity of government depends upon the consent of the governed ... [s]o what the people agreed to when they adopted the Constitution ... is what ought to govern us." In a 2017 article in the law review Constitutional Commentary, reviewing a book by Randy E. Barnett, Barrett wrote: "The Constitution's original public meaning is important not because adhering to it limits judicial discretion, but because it is the law. ...The Constitution's meaning is fixed until lawfully changed; thus, the court must stick with the original public meaning of the text even if it rules out the preference of a current majority."

According to Barrett, textualists believe that when a court interprets the words of statutes, it should use the most natural meaning of those words to an ordinary skilled user of words at the time, even if the court believes that the legislature intended that the words be understood in a special or idiosyncratic sense. If the legislature wishes the words of a statute to carry a special meaning different from how a non-legislator would understand them, it is free to define the terms in the statute. As Scalia put it, "[A]ll we can know is that [the legislature] voted for a text that they presumably thought would be read the same way any reasonable English speaker would read it." Scalia insisted that "it is simply incompatible with democratic government, or indeed, even with fair government, to have the meaning of a law determined by what the lawgiver meant, rather than by what the lawmaker promulgated."

Barrett has been critical of legal process theory, which gives a more expansive role to theory in shaping the interpretation of law than do textualism and originalism. She said that one example of the "process-based" approach can be found in King v. Burwell, in which the Supreme Court, for reasons related to the unorthodox legislative process that produced the Affordable Care Act, interpreted the phrase "Exchange established by the State" to mean "Exchange established by the State or the federal government."

Suspension of habeas corpus
In a journal article, "Suspension and Delegation", Barrett noted that constitutionally only Congress has the authority to decide the terms under which habeas corpus may be legitimately suspended. In all but one of the previous suspensions of habeas corpus, Barrett thought that Congress violated the Constitution "by enacting a suspension statute before an invasion or rebellion occurred—and in some instances, before one was even on the horizon." In an educational essay, she sided with the dissenters in Boumediene v. Bush after considering historical factors.

In 2018 Barrett wrote a dissent from the majority opinion in Schmidt v. Foster 17-1727 891 F.3d 302 (7th Cir. 2018), in which one of the factors considered was the scope of the defendant's habeas corpus rights. She applied her historical understanding in an argument that the defendant's habeas corpus rights had not been violated when a review was conducted without permitting his lawyer to participate. Following the en banc hearing, a majority of ten judges agreed with her position.

Precedent
At her 2017 Senate confirmation hearing for the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals, Barrett said she would follow Supreme Court precedent while on the appellate bench. According to The Hill, Barrett would "have much more leeway" to overturn its precedents as a member of the Court. In her nomination acceptance speech at the White House Rose Garden, Barrett said, "Judges are not policymakers, and they must be resolute in setting aside any policy views they might hold"; she has also said that judges "must apply the law as written".

In a 2013 article in Texas Law Review on the doctrine of stare decisis, Barrett listed seven cases that she believed should be considered "superprecedents"—cases the court would never consider overturning. They included Brown v. Board of Education and Mapp v. Ohio (incorporating the Fourth Amendment onto the states), but specifically excluded Roe v. Wade (1973). In explaining why it was excluded, Barrett referenced scholarship agreeing that in order to qualify as "superprecedent", a decision must have widespread support from not only jurists but politicians and the public at large to the extent of becoming immune to reversal or challenge (for example, the constitutionality of paper money). She argued that the people must trust a ruling's validity to such an extent that the matter has been taken "off of the court's agenda", with lower courts no longer taking challenges to them seriously. Barrett pointed to Planned Parenthood v. Casey (1992) as evidence that Roe had not attained this status, and quoted Richard H. Fallon Jr.: "[A] decision as fiercely and enduringly contested as Roe v. Wade has acquired no immunity from serious judicial reconsideration, even if arguments for overruling it ought not succeed."

Concerning the relationship of textualism to precedent, Barrett said, "It makes sense that one committed to a textualist theory would more often find precedent in conflict with her interpretation of the Constitution than would one who takes a more flexible, all-things-considered approach." She referenced a study by Michael Gerhardt which found that, as of 1994, no two justices in that century had called for overruling more precedents than Justices Scalia and Hugo Black, both of whom were textualists, even though Black was a liberal and Scalia a conservative. Gerhardt also found that during the Rehnquist court's last 11 years, the average number of times a justice called for the overruling of precedent was higher for textualist justices, with one per year coming from Ginsburg (non-textualist) up to just over two per year from Thomas (textualist). Gerhardt wrote that not all the calls for overruling were related to textualism issues, and that one must be careful in the inferences one draws from the numbers, which "do not indicate either why or on what basis the justices urged overruling."

Affordable Care Act
In 2012, Barrett signed a letter criticizing the Obama administration's approach to providing employees of religious institutions with birth control coverage without having the religious institutions pay for it.

Barrett has been critical of the majority opinion written by Chief Justice John G. Roberts, Jr. in National Federation of Independent Businesses v. Sebelius (2012), which upheld the constitutionality of the Affordable Care Act's individual mandate. She wrote in 2017: "Chief Justice Roberts pushed the Affordable Care Act beyond its plausible meaning to save the statute. He construed the penalty imposed on those without health insurance as a tax, which permitted him to sustain the statute as a valid exercise of the taxing power; had he treated the payment as the statute did—as a penalty—he would have had to invalidate the statute as lying beyond Congress’s commerce power."

Abortion
Barrett personally opposes abortion. In 2006, she signed an advertisement placed by St. Joseph County Right to Life, an anti-abortion group, in a South Bend, Indiana, newspaper. The advertisement read, "We, the following citizens of Michiana, oppose abortion on demand and defend the right to life from fertilization to natural death. Please continue to pray to end abortion." An unsigned, second page of the advertisement read, "It's time to put an end to the barbaric legacy of Roe v. Wade and restore laws that protect the lives of unborn children." In 2013, she signed another ad against Roe v. Wade that appeared in Notre Dame's student newspaper and described the decision as having "killed 55 million unborn children". The same year, she spoke at two anti-abortion events at Notre Dame.

Supreme Court nomination
Barrett has been on Trump's list of potential Supreme Court nominees since 2017, almost immediately after her court of appeals confirmation. In July 2018, after Anthony Kennedy's retirement announcement, she was reportedly one of three finalists Trump considered, along with Kavanaugh and Judge Raymond Kethledge.

After Kavanaugh's selection, Barrett was viewed as a possible nominee for a future U.S. Supreme Court vacancy. Ginsburg died on September 18, 2020, and Barrett was widely mentioned as the front-runner to succeed her. On September 26, 2020, Trump nominated Barrett to the Supreme Court.

Barrett's nomination was generally supported by Republicans, who have sought to confirm Barrett before Election Day. She is a favorite among the Christian right and social conservatives. Democrats generally oppose the nomination, and are opposed to filling the court vacancy during the 2020 presidential election campaign, in which voting was already underway in many states at the time of the nomination proceedings. Democrats are angered by the move to fill the vacancy in a presidential election year, as the Senate Republican majority had blocked President Barack Obama's nomination of Merrick Garland in 2016, during the last year of his presidency.

Personal life
In 1999, Barrett married fellow Notre Dame Law School graduate Jesse M. Barrett, a partner at SouthBank Legal - LaDue Curran & Kuehn LLC in South Bend, Indiana, and a law professor at the University of Notre Dame Law School. Previously, Jesse Barrett worked as an Assistant U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of Indiana for 13 years. They live in South Bend and have seven children, two of whom were adopted from Haiti, one in 2005 and one after the 2010 Haiti earthquake. Their youngest biological child has Down syndrome. Jesse's aunt assisted with childcare in their home beginning when the eldest was about one year old.

Barrett is a practicing Catholic. She has served as a laypastoral women's leader[a] in the Christian parachurch community People of Praise, an ecumenical covenant community founded in South Bend. Associated with the Catholic charismatic renewal movement but not formally affiliated with the Catholic Church, about 90% of its approximately 1,700 members are Catholic.

Barrett has voted in both Republican and Democratic primaries. She tested positive for COVID-19 in the summer of 2020 and has since recovered.

Affiliations
Barrett was a member of the Federalist Society from 2005 to 2006 and from 2014 to 2017. She is a member of the American Law Institute.