The White House announced Friday that Supreme Court nominee Judge Amy Coney Barrett has tested negative for COVID-19. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell says he plans to move forward with her confirmation process.
National attention has been brought to Barrett’s conservative views and how they might influence her decision making on the Supreme Court.
Beth Cate is a clinical associate professor at the O'Neill School of Public and Environmental Affairs and an attorney.
She says Barrett is an originalist and textualist, a legal philosophy that believes the U.S. Constitution should be interpreted as it was understood in the time when it was written.
"But, justices are not trained historians," she says. "So, you can also see great amounts of debate over what the historical record even is. And so, people make choices in that.’
Cate says in the past, Barrett has stated she thinks personal beliefs should not influence legal decisions, and her decisions have followed Supreme Court precedent.
But, once she’s a confirmed justice on the Supreme Court, she would have more flexibility to revisit precedents she thought were wrongly decided based on her legal philosophy.
