Supreme Court justice Amy Coney Barrett made brief, rare public remarks at an event this week, after another blockbuster term that generated significant commentary on her political leanings.
The Trump appointee spoke for just three minutes in front of an audience of judges at a Chicago hotel before making a "quick exit," Fox News reported.
For her comments Monday night at a judicial conference for the 7th Circuit, Barrett chose collegiality as her theme, echoing sentiments shared by her fellow justices in the past.
“It occurs to me that law is a profession that, unlike some others, operates continually through the strain of disagreement,” Barrett said. “Doctors cooperate and coordinate to deal with patients. Engineers work together to build the bridge."
“But litigants and their lawyers are pitted against one another on opposite sides of the ‘V,’” she continued.
Barrett used to be a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 7th Circuit, which covers courts in Illinois, Indiana, and Wisconsin.
Since rising to the highest court, Barrett has garnered a reputation as a moderate, angering some in the MAGA movement who expected her to be a reliably conservative vote.
She has gone against Trump in high-profile cases dealing with immigration, foreign aid and Trump's own legal troubles, which went before the Supreme Court as he campaigned for the presidency last year.
Her stock on the right rebounded earlier this summer when she wrote a blockbuster opinion curtailing nationwide injunctions - a win for Trump, whose agenda has faced repeated obstruction from district courts.
In her majority opinion, Barrett chided her liberal colleague, Ketanji Brown Jackson, for embracing an "imperial Judiciary" with sloppy legal reasoning.
“‘[E]veryone, from the President on down, is bound by law,’” Barrett wrote, quoting Jackson. “That goes for judges too.”
Despite her own pointed criticism of Jackson, Barrett told her audience in Chicago that the adversarial nature of the legal profession is one of its strengths.
“I think there is an upside to all of the professional hours that lawyers spend in disagreement,” Barrett said. “We not only do it well … but we also know how to do it without letting it consume relationships."
“When I look around this room, when I think about the lawyers I know in the 7th Circuit, I’m grateful for the way that our bar conducts itself,” she added. “Because that is what enables the judicial system to work well.”
