Nearly three years ago, Amy Coney Barrett, then a professor at Notre Dame Law School, made her first appearance before the Senate Judiciary Committee. The senators were weighing her nomination to the Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit, and the hearing would have typically received little attention.
Then, in a line of questioning directed toward the nominee’s views on the relationship between precedent and the legal philosophy of original meaning, Senator Dianne Feinstein, the ranking Democrat on the committee, emphasized possible conflicts between the nominee’s Catholic beliefs and established law. “I think in your case, professor, when you read your speeches, the conclusion one draws is that the dogma lives loudly within you,” she said.
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