Barrett...clearly knows that readers crave relatability, especially from women, so she deigns to offer a few breadcrumbs. But her book is inevitably a controlled performance, as careful and disciplined as its author. She’s not about to let her guard down ... Any personal details we do get are titrated just so ... There is a lot of fastidious legal exegesis in the book ... You might think that Barrett would be at least somewhat perturbed by the Trump administration’s incessant defiance of lower courts’ orders. But that doesn’t seem to be the case.
Although framed as an accessible introduction to constitutional basics and how the Supreme Court works, the book is actually much more. In unadorned, readable language, Barrett lays out the judicial philosophy she uses to decide cases.
A model of collegiality ... Sharp and well-organized mind ... She does give us a fun bit from 2018, after Justice Anthony Kennedy retired and a news crew followed her to church on a Sunday morning ... Justice Barrett seems genuinely burdened by the reality that most Americans know little about the Supreme Court ... At the heart of Justice Barrett’s book is her defense of her own philosophical outlook, summed up by the terms judicial humility and originalism ... On originalism, Justice Barrett writes superbly.
