President Donald Trump nominated Notre Dame law professor Amy Coney Barrett to be the newest Supreme Court justice Saturday, replacing the late liberal-leaning Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.In a press conference Saturday, Trump said Barrett’s qualifications are “unsurpassed,” and he expects her confirmation hearing to be “extremely uncontroversial.”“I pledge to discharge the responsibilities of this job to the best of my ability,” Barrett promised during the announcement.Barrett currently serves on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 7th Circuit, after having been confirmed in 2017. She has been teaching law at the University since 2002 and was named professor of the year by three of the law school’s graduating classes.The nominee attended Rhodes College for undergraduate, where she received a B.A. in English literature, and she earned her J.D. from Notre Dame. She was named a Kiley Fellow and earned the Hoynes Prize, which is the law school’s highest honor.After graduating from Notre Dame, Barrett clerked for the late Justice Antonin Scalia. Like Scalia, Barrett is a strict originalist and textualist, believing in the importance of viewing the law through the eyes of the founding fathers as well as the public the Constitution was created to serve.“If a judge parts from the text in the service of a more general purpose, that judge risks undoing the very compromise that made the enactment of the statute possible,” she said in a lecture in 2018 at Notre Dame.
University President Fr. John Jenkins congratulated Barrett on her nomination in a press release Saturday.
“An alumna and a faculty member of Notre Dame Law School, Judge Barrett has epitomized the University’s commitment to teaching, scholarship, justice and service to society,” he said. “She is a person of the utmost integrity who, as a jurist, acts first and foremost in accord with the law.”
