Listening to the Law Quotes

“The success of a multi-member court rides on the ability to disagree respectfully. The success of a democratic society does too.”
― Amy Coney Barrett, Listening to the Law: Reflections on the Court and Constitution

“It may sound counterintuitive, as it did to my aunt, but making judgments about what the law requires isn’t always the same thing as deciding what is just. In the Boston Marathon bombing case, the Court held that there was no legal impediment to executing Tsarnaev, not that executing him was moral. In Terry v. United States, the Court held that the law did not permit resentencing, not that Terry’s original sentence was fair. And in the flag-burning case, the Court held that the First Amendment protected that act of protest, not that flag burning is virtuous. In a system where judges are not Solomons, their role is limited. They are referees, not kings, because they decide whether people have played by the rules rather than what the rules should be. As much as some people might admire Solomon, he wouldn’t make it through a confirmation hearing if he proposed to decide cases in accordance with his own conscience. That’s as it should be under our Constitution.”
― Amy Coney Barrett, Listening to the Law: Reflections on the Court and Constitution

“An Anti-Federalist who called himself “Federal Farmer” characterized the framers themselves as “the consolidating aristocracy” whose proposed system concentrated power “in a few hands,” rendering a “strong tendency to aristocracy now discernable in every part of the plan.”[117] In another tract, he warned that the capital city of the proposed republic would “be the great, the visible, and dazzling centre, the mistress of fashions, and the fountain of politics” that housed the equivalent of a royal court, complete with its hangers-on.[118]”
― Amy Coney Barrett, Listening to the Law: Reflections on the Court and Constitution

“My writing tends to be spare, perhaps to a fault. When I was a law clerk for Judge Laurence Silberman, he once called me into his office and barked, “Amy, don’t be afraid of the adverb!” I’ve tried to take his advice. Still, I favor brief, clean sentences without extra words. My (obviously unattainable) target is more Hemingway than Dostoyevsky.”
― Amy Coney Barrett, Listening to the Law: Reflections on the Court and Constitution