Judge Barrett deserves better than a partisan endorsement.
Judge Barrett is a well-regarded legal scholar, with expertise in constitutional law and federal courts. Her reputation as a thoughtful member of the textualist school predates her current celebrity. As to her professional path, she placed first in her class at Notre Dame Law School, served as a clerk at the D.C. Circuit and then at the Court (for Justice Antonin Scalia), worked in private practice at a prominent D.C. firm, and spent many years on the faculty at Notre Dame. She has served as a judge on the Seventh Circuit for a couple years now. No one can doubt her acumen, and actually no one does. The objections to her nomination relate to other concerns. I became acquainted with Judge Barrett when I taught at Notre Dame Law School many years ago, when she was beginning her academic career. Already she had a reputation as a rising star—a careful thinker and writer and a great colleague and teacher. She struck me then as one of the most genuinely good people I had ever met—not just nice, but good. Everyone who has written about her, from every walk of her life, says the same thing. That’s not itself a reason for her to be on the Court, of course; as a progressive friend of mine remarked, Merrick Garland is no doubt a good person, too. But having a genuinely humble, kind, and compassionate person on the bench is not unimportant. Now, about the objections to her nomination. One objection relates to the process—specifically, to the fact that President Trump has nominated Judge Barrett only weeks before a presidential election, and to the fact that Senate Republicans refused to schedule a vote on the nomination of Judge Garland for almost a full year before the last presidential election four years ago.
