Amy Vivian Coney was born in 1972 in New Orleans, Louisiana, the daughter of Linda (née Vath) and Michael Coney. She is the eldest of seven children and has five sisters and a brother. Her father worked as an attorney for Shell Oil Company and her mother was a high school French teacher and homemaker. Barrett has Irish and French ancestry. Her great-great-great-grandparents on her mother’s side were from Ballyconnell, Co Cavan, Ireland, while there is also Irish blood among her father’s ancestors. Her great-great-grandparents emigrated from France to New Orleans. Her family is devoutly Catholic, and her father is an ordained deacon at St. Catherine of Siena Parish in Metairie, Louisiana, where she grew up.

She attended St. Mary’s Dominican High School, an all-girls Roman Catholic high school, from which she graduated in 1990. She was student body vice president of the high school. After high school, Barrett attended Rhodes College, where she majored in English literature and minored in French. She graduated in 1994 with a Bachelor of Arts magna cum laude and was inducted into Omicron Delta Kappa and Phi Beta Kappa. In her graduating class, she was named most outstanding English department graduate. She then attended the Notre Dame Law School on a full-tuition scholarship. She was an executive editor of the Notre Dame Law Review and graduated in 1997 ranked first in her class with a Juris Doctor summa cum laude.

From 1999 to 2002, Barrett practiced law at Miller, Cassidy, Larroca & Lewin, a boutique law firm for litigation in Washington, D.C., that merged with the Houston, Texas-based law firm Baker Botts in 2001. While at Baker Botts, she worked on Bush v. Gore, the lawsuit that grew out of the 2000 United States presidential election, providing research and briefing assistance for the firm’s representation of George W. Bush.

In 1999, Barrett married fellow Notre Dame Law School graduate Jesse M. Barrett, a partner at SouthBank Legal – LaDue Curran & Kuehn LLC, in South Bend, Indiana, and a law professor at Notre Dame Law School. Previously, Jesse Barrett had worked as an Assistant U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of Indiana for 13 years. The couple lives in South Bend and has seven children, two of whom were adopted from Haiti, one in 2005 and one after the 2010 Haiti earthquake. Their youngest biological child has Down syndrome. Jesse’s aunt assisted with childcare in their home beginning when the eldest was about one year old.

Barrett served as a visiting associate professor and John M. Olin Fellow in Law at George Washington University Law School for a year before returning to her alma mater, Notre Dame Law School, in 2002. At Notre Dame, she taught federal courts, evidence, constitutional law, and statutory interpretation. In 2007, she was a visiting professor at the University of Virginia School of Law. Barrett was named a professor of law in 2010, and from 2014 to 2017 held the Diane and M.O. Miller II Research Chair of Law. Her scholarship focused on constitutional law, originalism, statutory interpretation, and stare decisis. Her academic work has been published in the Columbia, Cornell, Virginia, Notre Dame, and Texas law reviews.

Barrett opposes abortion. In 2006, she signed an advertisement placed by St. Joseph County Right to Life, an anti-abortion group, in a South Bend, Indiana newspaper. The ad read, “We, the following citizens of Michiana, oppose abortion on demand and defend the right to life from fertilization to natural death. Please continue to pray to end abortion.” An unsigned, second page of the advertisement read, “It’s time to put an end to the barbaric legacy of Roe v. Wade and restore laws that protect the lives of unborn children.” In 2013, Barrett signed another ad against Roe v. Wade that appeared in Notre Dame’s student newspaper and described the decision as having “killed 55 million unborn children”. The same year, she spoke at two anti-abortion events at the university.

In 2010, Chief Justice John Roberts appointed Barrett to serve on the Advisory Committee for the Federal Rules of Appellate Procedure.

In 2012, Barrett signed a letter criticizing the Obama administration’s approach to providing employees of religious institutions with birth control coverage without having the religious institutions pay for it.

In a 2013 article in Texas Law Review on the doctrine of stare decisis, Barrett listed seven cases that she believed should be considered “superprecedents”—cases the court would never consider overturning. They included Brown v. Board of Education and Mapp v. Ohio (incorporating the Fourth Amendment onto the states), but specifically excluded Roe v. Wade (1973). In explaining why it was excluded, Barrett referenced scholarship agreeing that in order to qualify as “superprecedent”, a decision must have widespread support from not only jurists but politicians and the public at large to the extent of becoming immune to reversal or challenge (for example, the constitutionality of paper money). She argued that the people must trust a ruling’s validity to such an extent that the matter has been taken “off of the court’s agenda”, with lower courts no longer taking challenges to them seriously. Barrett pointed to Planned Parenthood v. Casey (1992) as evidence that Roe had not attained this status, and quoted Richard H. Fallon Jr.: “[A] decision as fiercely and enduringly contested as Roe v. Wade has acquired no immunity from serious judicial reconsideration, even if arguments for overruling it ought not succeed.”

Lambda Legal, an LGBT civil rights organization, co-signed a letter with 26 other gay rights organizations opposing Barrett’s nomination. The letter expressed doubts about her ability to separate faith from her rulings on LGBT matters. During her Senate hearing, Barrett was questioned about landmark LGBTQ legal precedents such as Obergefell v. Hodges, United States v. Windsor, and Lawrence v. Texas. She said these cases are “binding precedents” that she intended to “faithfully follow if confirmed” to the appeals court, as required by law. The letter Lambda Legal co-signed read, “Simply repeating that she would be bound by Supreme Court precedent does not illuminate—indeed, it obfuscates—how Professor Barrett would interpret and apply precedent when faced with the sorts of dilemmas that, in her view, ‘put Catholic judges in a bind.'” In 2015, Barrett signed a letter to the Synod on the Family affirming the Catholic Church’s teaching that “marriage and family [are] founded on the indissoluble commitment of a man and a woman”.

Barrett’s nomination was generally supported by Republicans, who sought to confirm her before the 2020 United States presidential election. She was a favorite among the Christian right and social conservatives. Democrats generally opposed the nomination, and were opposed to filling the court vacancy while election voting was already underway in many states. Democrats were angered by the move to fill the vacancy in a presidential election year only four months before the end of Trump’s term, as the Senate Republican majority had refused to consider President Barack Obama’s nomination of Merrick Garland in 2016, more than ten months before the end of his presidency.

On May 8, 2017, President Donald Trump nominated Barrett to the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit after Judge John Daniel Tinder took senior status. A Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on her nomination was held on September 6, 2017. During the hearing, Senator Dianne Feinstein questioned Barrett about a law review article Barrett co-wrote in 1998 with Professor John H. Garvey in which they argued that Catholic judges should in some cases recuse themselves from death penalty cases due to their moral objections to the death penalty. Asked to “elaborate on the statements and discuss how you view the issue of faith versus fulfilling the responsibility as a judge today,” Barrett said that she had participated in many death-penalty appeals while serving as law clerk to Scalia, adding, “My personal church affiliation or my religious belief would not bear on the discharge of my duties as a judge” and “It is never appropriate for a judge to impose that judge’s personal convictions, whether they arise from faith or anywhere else, on the law.” Barrett emphasized that the article was written in her third year in law school and that she was “very much the junior partner in our collaboration.” Worried that Barrett would not uphold Roe v. Wade given her Catholic beliefs, Feinstein followed Barrett’s response by saying, “the dogma lives loudly within you, and that is a concern.”

On October 5, 2017, the Senate Judiciary Committee voted 11–9 on party lines to recommend Barrett and report her nomination to the full Senate. On October 30, the Senate invoked cloture by a vote of 54–42. It confirmed her by a vote of 55–43 on October 31, with three Democrats—Joe Donnelly, Tim Kaine, and Joe Manchin—voting for her. She received her commission two days later. Barrett is the first and only woman to occupy an Indiana seat on the Seventh Circuit.

In 2017, the Seventh Circuit rejected the federal government’s appeal in a civil lawsuit against AutoZone; the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission argued that AutoZone’s assignment of employees to different stores based on race (e.g., “sending African American employees to stores in heavily African American neighborhoods”) violated Title VII of the Civil Rights Act. Following this, Barrett joined the court as it received a petition for rehearing en banc. Three judges—Chief Judge Diane Wood and judges Ilana Rovner and David Hamilton—voted to grant rehearing, and criticized the three-judge panel’s opinion as upholding a “separate-but-equal arrangement”. Barrett did not join the panel opinion, but voted with four judges to deny the petition to rehear the case. The petition was unsuccessful by a 5–3 decision.

Barrett clerked for Justice Antonin Scalia, and has spoken and written of her admiration of his adherence to the text of statutes and to originalism, writing: “His judicial philosophy is mine, too. A judge must apply the law as written. Judges are not policymakers, and they must be resolute in setting aside any policy views they may hold.” In one article she quoted Scalia on the importance of the original meaning of the Constitution: “The validity of government depends upon the consent of the governed … [s]o what the people agreed to when they adopted the Constitution … is what ought to govern us.” In a 2017 article in the law review Constitutional Commentary, reviewing a book by Randy E. Barnett, Barrett wrote: “The Constitution’s original public meaning is important not because adhering to it limits judicial discretion, but because it is the law. …The Constitution’s meaning is fixed until lawfully changed; thus, the court must stick with the original public meaning of the text even if it rules out the preference of a current majority.”

At her 2017 Senate confirmation hearing for the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals, Barrett said she would follow Supreme Court precedent while on the appellate bench. In 2020, during her nomination acceptance speech at the White House Rose Garden, Barrett said, “Judges are not policymakers, and they must be resolute in setting aside any policy views they might hold”; she also said judges “must apply the law as written”. She explained her view of precedent in response to questions at the hearing.

In May 2018, Barrett dissented when the panel majority found that an accused murderer’s right to counsel was violated when the state trial judge directly questioned the accused while forbidding his attorney from speaking. Following rehearing en banc, a majority of the circuit’s judges agreed with her position.

In August 2018, Barrett wrote for a unanimous panel when it determined that the police had lacked probable cause to search a vehicle based solely upon an anonymous tip that people were “playing with guns”, because no crime had been alleged. Barrett distinguished Navarette v. California and wrote, “the police were right to respond to the anonymous call by coming to the parking lot to determine what was happening. But determining what was happening and immediately seizing people upon arrival are two different things, and the latter was premature…Watson’s case presents a close call. But this one falls on the wrong side of the Fourth Amendment.”

In June 2018, Barrett wrote for the unanimous panel when it found that a plaintiff could not sue Teva Pharmaceuticals for alleged defects in her IUD due to the lack of supportive expert testimony, writing, “the issue of causation in her case is not obvious.”

Barrett was on Trump’s list of potential Supreme Court nominees since 2017, almost immediately after her court of appeals confirmation. In July 2018, after Justice Anthony Kennedy’s retirement announcement, she was reportedly one of three finalists Trump considered, along with Kavanaugh and Judge Raymond Kethledge.

After Kavanaugh’s selection in 2018, Barrett was viewed as a possible nominee for a future U.S. Supreme Court vacancy. Ginsburg died on September 18, 2020, and Barrett was widely mentioned as the front-runner to succeed her. On September 26, 2020, Trump announced his intention to nominate Barrett to the Supreme Court.

In June 2019, the court, in a unanimous decision written by Barrett, reinstated a suit brought by a male Purdue University student (John Doe) who had been found guilty of sexual assault by Purdue University, which resulted in a one-year suspension, loss of his Navy ROTC scholarship, and expulsion from the ROTC affecting his ability to pursue his chosen career in the Navy. Doe alleged the school’s Advisory Committee on Equity discriminated against him on the basis of his sex and violated his rights to due process by not interviewing the alleged victim, not allowing him to present evidence in his defense, including an erroneous statement that he confessed to some of the alleged assault, and appearing to believe the victim instead of the accused without hearing from either party or having even read the investigation report. The court found that Doe had adequately alleged that the university deprived him of his occupational liberty without due process in violation of the Fourteenth Amendment and had violated his Title IX rights “by imposing a punishment infected by sex bias”, and remanded to the District Court for further proceedings.

In 2019, Barrett wrote the unanimous three-judge panel opinion affirming summary judgment in the case of Smith v. Illinois Department of Transportation. Smith was a Black employee who claimed racial discrimination upon his dismissal by the department and that he was called a “stupid-ass nigger” by a Black supervisor; the department claimed Smith failed work-level expectations during probationary periods. Barrett wrote that usage of the racial slur was egregious, but Smith’s testimony showed no evidence that his subjective experience of the workplace changed because of the slur, nor did it change the department’s fact that his discharge was related to “poor performance”.

In May 2019, the court rejected a Yemeni citizen and her U.S. citizen husband’s challenge to a consular officer’s decision to twice deny her visa application under the Immigration and Nationality Act. The U.S. citizen argued that this had deprived him of a constitutional right to live in the United States with his spouse. In a 2–1 majority opinion authored by Barrett, the court held that the plaintiff’s claim was properly dismissed under the doctrine of consular nonreviewability. Barrett declined to address whether the husband had been denied a constitutional right (or whether the constitutional right to live in the United States with his spouse existed at all) because the consular officer’s decision to deny the visa application was facially legitimate and bona fide, and under Supreme Court precedent, in such a case courts will not “look behind the exercise of that discretion”. The dispute concerned what it takes to satisfy this standard. A petition for rehearing en banc was denied, with Chief Judge Wood, joined by Rovner and Hamilton, dissenting. Barrett wrote a rare opinion concurring in the denial of rehearing en banc (joined by Judge Joel Flaum).

Barrett has never ruled directly on abortion, but she did vote to rehear a successful challenge to Indiana’s parental notification law in 2019. In 2018, she voted against striking down another Indiana law requiring burial or cremation of fetal remains. In both cases, Barrett voted with the minority. The Supreme Court later reinstated the fetal remains law, and in July 2020 it ordered a rehearing in the parental notification case.

In February 2019, Barrett joined a unanimous panel decision upholding a Chicago “bubble ordinance” that prohibits approaching within a certain distance of an abortion clinic or its patrons without consent. Citing the Supreme Court’s buffer zone decision in Hill v. Colorado, the court rejected the plaintiffs’ challenge to the ordinance on First Amendment grounds.

In March 2019, Barrett dissented when the court upheld the federal law prohibiting felons from possessing firearms. The majority rejected the as-applied challenge raised by the plaintiff, who had been convicted of felony mail fraud, and upheld the felony dispossession statute as “substantially related to an important government interest in preventing gun violence.” In her dissent, Barrett argued that while the government has a legitimate interest in denying gun possession to felons convicted of violent crimes, there is no evidence that denying guns to nonviolent felons promotes this interest, and that the law violates the Second Amendment.

In February 2019, Barrett wrote for a unanimous panel when it found that police officers had been unreasonable to assume “that a woman who answers the door in a bathrobe has authority to consent to a search of a male suspect’s residence.” Therefore, the district court should have granted the defendant’s motion to suppress evidence found in the residence as the fruit of an unconstitutional search.

In January 2019, Barrett wrote for a unanimous panel when it denied qualified immunity to a civil lawsuit sought by a defendant who as a homicide detective had knowingly provided false and misleading information in the probable cause affidavit that was used to obtain an arrest warrant for the plaintiff. (The charges were later dropped and the plaintiff was released.) The court found the defendant’s lies and omissions violated “clearly established law” and the plaintiff’s Fourth Amendment rights and thus the detective was not shielded by qualified immunity.

In June 2019, Barrett wrote for the unanimous panel when it found that the Fair Debt Collection Practices Act cannot create a cause of action for a debtor who received collection letters lacking notices required by the statute because she suffered no injury-in-fact to create constitutional standing to sue under Article III. Wood dissented from the denial of rehearing en banc. The issue created a circuit split.

In June 2020, Barrett wrote a 40-page dissent when the majority upheld a preliminary injunction against the Trump administration’s controversial “public charge rule”, which heightened the standard for obtaining a green card. In her dissent, she argued that any noncitizens who disenrolled from government benefits because of the rule did so due to confusion about the rule itself rather than from its application, writing that the vast majority of the people subject to the rule are not eligible for government benefits in the first place. On the merits, Barrett departed from her colleagues Wood and Rovner, who held that DHS’s interpretation of that provision was unreasonable under Chevron Step Two. Barrett would have held that the new rule fell within the broad scope of discretion granted to the Executive by Congress through the Immigration and Nationality Act. The public charge issue is the subject of a circuit split.

In August 2020, Barrett wrote for the unanimous panel when it held that a Teamsters local did not have standing to appeal an order in the Shakman case because it was not formally a party to the case. The union had not intervened in the action, but rather merely submitted a memorandum in the district court opposing a motion, which the Seventh Circuit determined was insufficient to give the union a right to appeal.

Barrett became the 103rd associate justice of the Supreme Court of the United States on October 27, 2020. On the evening of the confirmation vote, Trump hosted a swearing-in ceremony at the White House. As Barrett requested, Justice Clarence Thomas administered the oath of office to her, the first of two necessary oaths. She took the judicial oath, administered by Chief Justice John Roberts, the next day. Having hired her allotted four law clerks, she took part in her first oral arguments on November 2, hearing the case U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service v. Sierra Club.