Chapter 1
My Life in the Law
On my desk at home, I keep a picture of my great-grandmother's small house. I didn't know my great-grandmother; she died five years before I was born. Nor did I ever visit the house while family lived in it. I saw it for the first time almost ten years ago, when my siblings and I rented a party bus to take my parents on a "This Is Your Life" tour of New Orleans for my father's seventieth birthday. As lifelong New Orleanians, my parents have a long list of places with special memories, including this house on Green Street, where my mother spent many Sunday afternoons. On a lark, we knocked on the door to see if the owners would let us peek inside. They did.
The thing that struck me most was its size: tiny. The house was a single-story with a small living room, compact kitchen, and three bedrooms. The space seemed suitable for a small family. My great-grandmother, however, was a widow with thirteen children. (In a moment that must have been heart-wrenching, she discovered her pregnancy with the thirteenth after her husband's funeral.) She purchased the house with the proceeds of her husband's life insurance policy, knowing that no one would rent to a woman living alone with such a large family. The children didn't all move in with her: one had tragically died, and the oldest few were living independently. Still, the house was bursting at the seams. While I was surveying the tight space, my mother told me that my great-grandmother had also taken in three relatives who needed lodging. It was the Great Depression, so everyone was struggling. And as if she didn't have enough mouths to feed, she welcomed the many homeless men traveling through the neighborhood with food on the back porch. (She allowed them to sleep under her raised house until one fell asleep with a cigarette in his mouth and started a fire. After that, it was dinner only.) Little wonder that my great-grandmother has legendary status in our family.
Though my great-grandmother's generosity is inspiring, it's not why I keep the picture. Standing inside her small house, I couldn't believe how much she had fit into her life. At the time we made this visit, I was feeling more than a little sorry for myself. My husband, Jesse, and I were balancing two careers (I as a law professor, he as a federal prosecutor) and seven young children. On the one hand, we had every reason to be happy-we loved each other, our children, and (most of the time) our jobs. On the other hand, life had also thrown us some curveballs-like our youngest son's diagnosis of Down syndrome, which added new medical appointments and educational challenges to our already full schedule. I was feeling overwhelmed and wondering whether we could pull it all off. This window into my great-grandmother's life strengthened my resolve. Somehow, she always managed to find the resources, space, and time. With much less than I have, she took on much more. Looking at the photo reminds me of a woman who stretched herself beyond all reasonable capacity. 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.
I didn’t grow up wanting to be a lawyer. Since I loved to read, I dreamed mostly about being an author or an English teacher. That was true through college, where I majored in English and spent most of my time reading literature and writing essays about it. Inspired by my college mentors, I considered pursuing a PhD in English, followed by a career as an English professor. But when it came time to apply, I hesitated. I loved literature but felt pulled by law. It too relied on words, but to a very different end. Law governs the relationship of the government to its citizens and its citizens to one another. It matters in everything from the sale of property to a criminal trial to the structure of government. No matter the context, law has real-world consequences. I wanted to know how it worked and to help people navigate it. (I also thought it might be easier to get a job as a lawyer than as an English professor.) In 1994, I walked into my first class at Notre Dame Law School.
I loved studying the law. Granted, reading cases was not as captivating as reading Shakespeare-but they held my attention all the same. I liked pulling out their logic to see whether it held up. Both in and out of class, I enjoyed debating issues like how the Constitution should be interpreted and whether it was just. And though I had the same nerves as every other first-year law student staring down final exams, I did well, which increased my confidence. While home on a holiday break, I ran into a high school teacher who asked how law school was going; I recall gushing that I had found the perfect fit. Saying it out loud drove home how true it was. From the first day of class, I never doubted my choice to become a lawyer.
I was unsure what kind of law I wanted to practice, but I knew where I wanted to do it: New Orleans, where I grew up and where my tight-knit extended family still lived. I thought I'd start at a law firm and perhaps shift later to teaching or public interest work. I was not, however, focused single-mindedly on my career-I wanted the path I chose to be compatible with raising the children I hoped to have. I loved growing up in a large family and wanted to have one myself. When I considered my future, I thought mostly about how to pull off being a working mother with a full house. Becoming a judge was not my ambition.
I left Notre Dame in May 1997 with a diploma and friendships I still treasure. And taking what I saw as a detour on my way to New Orleans, I headed to Washington to spend two years as a law clerk, a job that functions as a highly prized apprenticeship for a recent law school graduate. (I'll tell you more about the work of law clerks later in the book.) I worked first for Judge Laurence H. Silberman on the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit and then for Justice Antonin Scalia on the Supreme Court of the United States. Both clerkships influenced me greatly-in fact, they changed the course of my career.
I had never met anyone like Judge Silberman. In addition to stints in private practice, he had served as the ambassador to Yugoslavia, deputy attorney general, solicitor of labor, and undersecretary of labor. His interests were as varied as his experience. We clerks (there were three of us) had to be ready to field questions not only on our cases, but also on foreign affairs, domestic politics, twentieth-century world history, and even his hobby of boating. We went to lunch several times a week, often at the Department of Labor cafeteria (which the judge loved for nostalgia's sake), where he regaled us with stories about his service in the Nixon and Ford administrations and his years at Dartmouth and Harvard.
Time with the judge was good for me in many ways, but particularly because it pried me out of my office. Since I can remember, I have had a somewhat obsessive focus on efficiency, devoting every minute to reducing my to-do list. (That has not escaped the notice of my friends: I am often teased for my fast walk, which minimizes time spent in transit.) I dislike yielding time to lunch, and left to my own devices that year, I would have stayed buried all day in briefs, books, and draft opinions. Judge Silberman would have none of it. He carried more than triple my workload at the court and performed it with ease, whether peppering advocates with questions at oral argument, spinning the straw of our draft opinions into gold, or scrapping our drafts entirely to write his own. Still, he made time for relationships. I remember much more about our lunches than the cases I worked on that year, and I emerged from my clerkship with a lifelong mentor. His example has affected the way I conduct my professional life-he taught me that relationships are part of work, not a distraction from it.
The following year, I got to see Justice Scalia's approach in action when I served as his law clerk, a job that entailed helping him to prepare for oral arguments, researching legal issues, and preparing draft opinions. Because Justice Scalia didn't need much assistance in any of these tasks, the clerks were only marginally useful to him-but our time with him was invaluable to us.
We clerks had the opportunity to see the private side of a public figure. By the time I began working for him in 1998, Justice Scalia was a well-established intellectual force both on and off the Court. His opinions made it into law school textbooks because they were not only incisive, but witty too, and his public speeches drew large crowds of lawyers and nonlawyers alike. To say that I was intimidated when I interviewed for the job is a massive understatement. (Truth be told, I never got over that intimidation during all the years I knew him-he was just that smart and self-possessed.)
It was a different story with the justice in private. We heard him belt opera tunes from his office (he had an excellent voice), joined him at his favorite Italian dive for anchovy pizza (he made us all try it at least once), and were entertained by stories from his hunting trips (his favorite pastime). We once got our hands on a picture of him dressed in camouflage, proudly holding a wild turkey, and had a computer mousepad made with it. We snuck it onto his desk, slightly concerned that we had overstepped, but when he found it a few hours later, we could hear his laughter down the hall. Justice Scalia mixed intensity with humor and a fiery personality with kindness. And while he was serious about his work, it never displaced his more fundamental commitments to his family and faith.
I once attended an event related to the release of one of his books, and he spoke to the crowd with his characteristic vigor and humor. When I talked to him privately afterward, however, his demeanor was entirely different. He was somber, his voice marked by grief. Confiding that his son-in-law had just died, he asked me to pray for his newly widowed daughter and her children. I assured him of my prayers and walked away with renewed admiration for the fully human person who was Antonin Scalia. He was so much more than a boisterous, brilliant public figure. Throughout my career, both his personal and professional life have inspired me.
When my clerkship ended, I spent a few years practicing law in Washington, D.C. I married Jesse Barrett, a fellow Notre Dame graduate, in 1999. We seriously considered moving to New Orleans-I'm not sure that I've ever fully shaken the desire to live in my hometown. Instead, we returned to our alma mater, in South Bend, Indiana. I served on the faculty for fifteen years, Jesse practiced law, and we had the big family that we both wanted.
Jesse and I have seven children, which required us then, and requires us now, to strive for efficiency (think fast walking) and balance. To make our family of nine work, we integrated our personal life and our work life. We lived close to campus, and our children loved to visit me at my office. I kept a basket of toys for them there, and they were very comfortable roaming the halls of the law school, where the annual Halloween trick-or-treating was one of their favorite events. (In all seriousness, giving up that event was one of their biggest complaints about moving.) I frequently visited their classrooms for parties and Christmas pageants, and they occasionally visited mine for less engaging attractions like lectures in constitutional law. I wrote law review articles at home, and they used the backs of my printouts as scratch paper for drawing. Law students came to our house for dinner, and my children came for lunch at the law school café.
Meanwhile, our children also had a window into Jesse's work. When he was a federal prosecutor, they attended some of his trials, and they peppered him with questions about his cases at the dinner table. (His criminal prosecutions were much more interesting to them than the substance of my law school lectures.) Our younger children went through a phase of writing out pretend "indictments" of one another, charging imaginary crimes or violations of our family rules. I have saved some of those for the family scrapbooks. When Jesse left the government for private practice, they missed the excitement of criminal law. On the upside, they fought for the chance to spend days off from school at his new office, which-unlike mine-had a kitchen stocked with snacks and soda.
In other words, daily life was not divided into "law" and "parenting." It was all happening at once-which was healthy, because it kept law in perspective for me. Law is but one piece of what it takes to make a healthy society, and it (like everything else in life) exists in the midst of relationships.
Our life was good, but like anyone's, it was not perfect. Children had personal struggles and hard diagnoses; there were challenging pregnancies and adoption adjustments; and friends and relatives struggled with illness. Like everyone, we hit rough patches at work. Overall, though, we considered ourselves fortunate and never imagined that the pattern of our life would change.
But in 2017, things took a turn that I had not anticipated: I became a federal judge. The opportunity was unexpected but appealing. I was drawn to the idea of public service and having a more direct influence on the law; Jesse was completely supportive. President Donald J. Trump nominated me and the Senate confirmed me to a seat on the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit, which is based in Chicago and hears cases from Illinois, Indiana, and Wisconsin. I substituted tenure at a university for a lifetime appointment on the bench-both secure jobs-and thought this transition from teaching cases to deciding them would be my last career change.
The new job required adjustments to our schedule, but not a move. I drove to nearby Chicago to hear arguments, but my primary chambers were in South Bend, just a few minutes from our home. Like my campus office, my chambers became a popular destination for the kids. My offices happened to have an attached courtroom-not a typical feature in the chambers of an appellate judge. The younger children conducted pretend trials from the bench and played with the foosball table that I put in the courtroom for my clerks. The older girls, in high school by then, brought their mock trial teams to the courtroom, which was a good place for me to be a guest coach offering a crash course on the rules of evidence. Life continued to hum along.
Copyright © 2025 by Amy Coney Barrett. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
