The New Yorker:

Recent memoirs by the Justices reveal how a new vision of restraint has led to radical outcomes.

By Ruth Marcus

To understand how grudging Amy Coney Barrett’s new book is when it comes to revealing personal details, consider that one of the family members the Supreme Court Justice most often refers to is a great-grandmother who died five years before she was born. On Barrett’s desk at home, she recounts in “Listening to the Law,” she keeps a photograph of her great-grandmother’s one-story house, where, as a widow during the Great Depression, she raised some of her thirteen children and took in other needy relatives. “Looking at the photo reminds me of a woman who stretched herself beyond all reasonable capacity,” Barrett explains. “I’m not sure that I’ll be able to manage my life with the same grace that she had. But she motivates me to keep trying.” For Barrett, the mother of seven children, that effort entails setting her alarm for 5 a.m. “Our kids get up at six thirty during the school year, so I start early if I want to accomplish anything on my own to-do list,” she writes. This is what passes for disclosure from Barrett; she measures out the details of her life with coffee spoons, careful not to spill. You can almost hear the Justice’s editor pleading for something—anything—more in return for a reported two-million-dollar advance.

Instead, Barrett, the last of Donald Trump’s three first-term nominees, dispenses with biography in a single, brisk chapter. Of her upbringing in New Orleans, where her Catholic family belonged to a faith community called People of Praise, we learn nothing—not even her parents’ occupations. (Her father was a lawyer for Shell Oil, her mother, a high-school French teacher turned homemaker.) Barrett and her husband, Jesse, met in law school at Notre Dame, and they later returned to South Bend—Barrett to teach, her husband to be a federal prosecutor—before Trump’s election propelled Barrett to a federal appeals-court judgeship and ultimately to the Supreme Court. She offers glimpses of their family—a son who learns to drive with the Justice’s security detail trailing behind, two children the Barretts adopted from Haiti, the “curveball” of their youngest child’s Down syndrome—but these are fleeting. Barrett has previously described having a child with special needs as “probably the thing in my life that has helped me to grow the most and that has pushed me the most”; the reader learns little about that experience.

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