LISTENING TO THE LAW: Reflections on the Court and Constitution, by Amy Coney Barrett

Justice Amy Coney Barrett has had quite the journey.

Since joining the Supreme Court in 2020, she has voted with the conservative majority to clip the powers of federal agencies, end affirmative action, expand gun rights and overturn Roe v. Wade. Yet the handful of times that Barrett has sided with the three liberal justices she has elicited paroxysms of MAGA rage, with conservative pundits denouncing her as “evil,” a “closet liberal,” a “D.E.I. hire.”

Some of that right-wing fury has died down in the last couple of months, seemingly quelled by Barrett’s majority opinion at the end of June, which handed a victory to President Trump by limiting the ability of federal courts to issue nationwide injunctions. Those injunctions had been in response to an executive order purporting to end birthright citizenship, enshrined in the 14th Amendment. But Barrett, who was co-author of a 2016 paper calling the 14th Amendment “possibly illegitimate,” maintained that the lower courts’ efforts to uphold a constitutional right were exercises in judicial overreach. She even directed a pointed swipe at her fellow justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, whose blistering dissent warned that the majority was creating a “zone of lawlessness” for the president to “take or leave the law” as he wishes.

“We will not dwell on Justice Jackson’s argument,” Barrett wrote, with icy disdain, “which is at odds with more than two centuries’ worth of precedent, not to mention the Constitution itself.”

I kept thinking about this spectacularly scornful line while reading Barrett’s new book, “Listening to the Law: Reflections on the Court and Constitution.” Barrett highlights the “collegiality” of the Supreme Court, whose traditions include weekly lunches and welcome dinners for new justices. When Jackson was confirmed in 2022, it was Barrett’s turn to host; she served Jackson’s favorite dishes and asked a Broadway performer to sing selections from “Hamilton.”

It all makes for a pleasant (if surreal) scene. But if you really listen to what Barrett says in “Listening to the Law,” you’ll quickly realize that she isn’t on the Supreme Court because she wants to make friends. Barrett, a former law professor and circuit court judge, 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, even for a reported $2 million advance.