Josh Blackman | 10.7.2025 11:25 PM

Justice Barrett's new book is not a memoir. Though she sprinkles the book with some anecdotes about her family, Listening Law is quite guarded concerning how Barrett came to be where she is now. Her press appearances have likewise been fairly controlled, and she seems to repeat the same sets of pre-scripted answers. Yet, if you read between the lines, we can start to tie some threads together.

The first thread is that Justice Barrett did not aspire to be a judge before becoming a lawyer. Barrett's father was an attorney. But the Justice said in a recent press appearance that she wanted to be a teacher, like her mother. By contrast, some of Barrett's colleagues had their sights on the bench at a young age. In her high school yearbook, Elena Kagan wore a robe and held a gavel, and included a Felix Frankfurter quote. Samuel Alito's Princeton Yearbook said, "Sam intends to go to law school and eventually to warm a seat on the Supreme Court." Justice Jackson said that Judge Constance Baker Motley (with whom she shares a birthday) was a "North Star for me in my career." I don't get the impression that a young Amy Coney aspired for the bar or the bench, in the ways that some of her colleagues did.

Second, even after Barrett clerked for Justice Scalia, it still does not seem that she aspired to the bench, at least not right away. As a law professor, she did not do the sorts of things that an aspiring judge would do. I've written before how Barrett did not become........

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