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On Thursday evening, Justice Amy Coney Barrett walked onto a spotlit Lincoln Center stage and into the tricky position of trying to explain a court that has often, in recent months, declined to explain itself.
The appearance in New York kicked off a round of publicity events for Justice Barrett’s book, “Listening to the Law,” to be published Tuesday. The book is Justice Barrett’s bid for trust in the Supreme Court. Writing in a civics-textbook tone, she describes how she reasons her way through cases and calls herself scrupulously neutral.
“My office doesn’t entitle me to align the legal system with my moral or policy views,” she writes. “Swearing to apply the law faithfully means deciding each case based on my best judgment about what the law is. If I decide a case based on my judgment about what the law should be, I’m cheating.”
“Thinking in those categories of left and right, it’s just the wrong way to think about the law,” she added at the packed event on Thursday, hosted by The Free Press, the four-year-old online media outlet.
Justice Barrett plays an extraordinarily powerful role on the court, as part of the three-member fulcrum whose votes often decide cases, and her book is billed as a rare look inside her work.
But her book, and the publicity events, may also draw attention for all she doesn’t answer. In “Listening to the Law,” she does not grapple with the paradox of her position: Though Justice Barrett has clinched a 50-year conservative legal revolution, overturning precedents on abortion, affirmative action and gun control, she also is seeking a reputation for independence and the trust of Americans with diverse views.
