Over the last 25 years, the Supreme Court has wrestled with numerous major moral questions: the definition of marriage, religious liberty, abortion, and even, very recently, the legality of states barring minors from undergoing “gender” transitions. Most of the “culture wars” that animate conservative Christians fall directly within the purview of the Supreme Court. But even then, the Supreme Court remains cloaked in mystery—especially since its internal deliberations are kept strictly confidential.
Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett’s memoir, Listening to the Law: Reflections on the Court and the Constitution (Sentinel, 336 pp.), helps illuminate the role of the Supreme Court in the United States. In it, Barrett provides a comprehensive overview of the court’s purpose, its history, its proscribed limitations, its preparations for hearing cases, the frameworks by which its justices interpret the Constitution, and the rationales underlying the court’s decisions. In all, I cannot recommend the book highly enough, as readers will find it to be as much a crash course in American civics as it is a manifesto on the Supreme Court itself.
As Barrett is at pains to say throughout the book, the job of Supreme Court justices is to put aside their own policy preferences and objectively rule on cases whose outcomes may be against their personal preferences, yet nonetheless yield the most accurate reading of the law itself. She writes: “We judges don’t dispense justice solely as we see it; instead, we’re constrained by law adopted through the democratic process.” Barrett writes movingly of the courage needed to withstand the torrents of popular opinion that demand capitulation to social pressures rather than unbiased judicial analysis.
Most surprisingly, given the protracted moral debates often decided along typical “conservative versus liberal” lines, Barrett claims the court is not nearly as politicized as many would believe. The statistics are telling: In the 2022 term, for example, 47% of cases received unanimous rulings. Another 9% were almost unanimous, meaning that more than half of the cases before the court are not divided neatly between conservatives and liberals. Figures like this debunk accusations of the court’s partisanship and illegitimacy.
Readers will also benefit from Barrett’s explanation of her approach to constitutional interpretation, namely originalism and textualism. According to her preferred school of interpretation, justices on the Supreme Court are at their best when they refrain from making policy prescriptions or governing from the bench. For Barrett, proper interpretation requires understanding the original meaning of the words of the Constitution and statutory law at the time of their passage. While that may seem obvious, Barrett demonstrates that this constrained approach to legal interpretation is not universally accepted. Other justices view the Constitution as a “living” document, one that is adjusted to meet the demands of the present day.
In Barrett’s approach to constitutional interpretation, the discerning Christian reader will notice parallels to how Christians should interpret the Bible: by taking seriously the words in their linguistic and cultural context and the author’s intent. It is no stretch of the imagination to suggest that Christians ought to be originalists and textualists in their own interpretation.
Perhaps disappointingly, Barrett hardly comments on her conservative Catholic faith within the book. Readers may recall that at the time of her federal appeals court nomination, her Catholic faith was heavily scrutinized, with former Senator Dianne Feinstein now famously—and condescendingly—saying to her, “The dogma lives loudly within you.” Her recusal from offering reflections about her faith may be understandable, given the judicial ethics at play in a sitting Supreme Court justice writing a book about the rules of interpretation, which necessitates maintaining a distance between her personal beliefs and the cases before her.
Still, after reading her excellent volume, I am struck by how our social discourse places an outsized burden on the Supreme Court to harmonize questions of law and morality, even as we give short shrift to Congress—the constitutional forum where that harmony is supposed to be publicly debated and enacted. Instead of protracted debates on bending doctrine so jurists can smuggle moral premises into opinions, perhaps we should ask legislators to recover first principles. A congressional reading group on Aquinas’ Treatise on Law would be a better start than yet another theory of covert judicial moralizing. I think Justice Barrett would give a hearty “Amen” to this.
Readers of this volume looking for an in-depth exploration of law and morality will be disappointed. But readers looking for an in-depth foray into the court’s inner proceedings and traditions will find the book delightful.
Originally published at WORLD on November 7, 2025.
