Profile: Amy Coney Barrett, Trump's new Supreme Court nominee

Source: Xinhua| 2020-09-27 14:31:08|Editor: huaxia

WASHINGTON, Sept. 26 (Xinhua) -- U.S. President Donald Trump announced on Saturday that he's nominating Amy Coney Barrett, a conservative federal appellate judge, for the Supreme Court to replace the late liberal Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

Barrett, 48, has served as a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 7th Circuit, which covers Indiana, Illinois, and Wisconsin, since October 2017.

Barrett is also a professor at the University of Notre Dame's Law School, where she has taught constitutional law, federal courts, and statutory interpretation.

A member of the American Law Institute, Barrett has served as a visiting associate professor and John M. Olin Fellow in Law at the George Washington University Law School and as a visiting associate professor of law at the University of Virginia.

Earlier in her career, she practiced at U.S. law firms Miller, Cassidy, Larroca & Lewin LLP and Baker Botts LLP.

Before joining the Notre Dame faculty, Barrett clerked for Judge Laurence H. Silberman on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, and on the Supreme Court for Justice Antonin Scalia, a conservative legal icon who died in 2016.

"I clerked for Justice Scalia more than 20 years ago, but the lessons I learned still resonate," Barrett said at the White House on Saturday. "His judicial philosophy is mine too: A judge must apply the law as written. Judges are not policymakers, and they must be resolute in setting aside any policy views they might hold."

Barrett earned her B.A. in English literature, magna cum laude, from Rhodes College in Memphis, Tennessee, where she was elected to Phi Beta Kappa. She earned her J.D., summa cum laude, from Notre Dame Law School, as the number one student in her class, and served as executive editor of the Notre Dame Law Review.

Born in 1972 in New Orleans, Louisiana, Barrett is the eldest of seven children, with five sisters and a brother.

A Catholic, Barrett has been married to her husband Jesse M. Barrett since 1999. They live in South Bend and have seven children, two of whom were adopted from Haiti. Her youngest child has Down Syndrome.

"Amy is more than a stellar scholar and judge; she is also a profoundly devoted mother," Trump said of Barrett on Saturday. "If confirmed, Justice Barrett will make history as the first mother of school-aged children ever to serve on the U.S. Supreme Court."

Trump successfully appointed two conservatives on the Supreme Court, Neil Gorsuch in 2017 and Brett Kavanaugh in 2018, tilting the institution to the right with a 5-4 majority. Barrett, if confirmed, would give the conservative wing a solid 6-3 advantage at the high court and would also be the youngest member of the nine-justice bench and likely serve for decades to come.

Republicans, who have a 53-47 majority in the Senate, are moving to fast track Barrett's confirmation process and they intend to hold a full floor vote before the November election, while Democrats have strongly opposed taking up the Trump nominee and added scrutiny to her records on a number of issues, including abortion and health care. Enditem

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