Who is Amy Coney Barrett, Trump’s Supreme Court nominee?

Washington, DC – Few people in the United States may have heard the name Amy Coney Barrett before this week. But in conservative legal circles, US President Donald Trump’s pick to fill the vacancy on the US Supreme Court has made a name for herself as a brilliant academic with a sharp legal mind. Barrett, 48, came to national prominence in 2017 when she was pulled from her post as a law professor at the University of Notre Dame and named to the US Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit. Barrett had never served as a judge before Trump nominated her to the appeals court, a major position in the US judiciary. The Seventh Circuit hears cases arising from seven federal court districts in Illinois, Indiana and Wisconsin, three states in the American Midwest. That combination of academic and appellate work put Barrett on a fast track to the US Supreme Court. When Trump nominated Justice Brett Kavanaugh for a seat in 2018, Barrett was already on his short list of candidates. Barrett was a law professor at the University of Notre Dame, where her writings on US constitutional theory gained her notice in conservative legal circles [Matt Cashore/Notre Dame University/Handout via Reuters]Randy Barnett, a law professor at Georgetown University, said Barrett “is knowledgeable” about US constitutional theory “as evidenced by her writings as a constitutional law professor”. “She has the intellectual firepower to hold her own with the others on the court – with the best of the others on the court,” Barnett told Al Jazeera. Polarised debate Barrett is a graduate of Notre Dame Law School, where she was editor of the law review and finished first in her class in 1997. She clerked at the US Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit and then the Supreme Court after law school. She also practised law at a private firm in Washington, DC, for three years before returning to Notre Dame in 2002 to teach. Barnett’s affiliation with conservative Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia and her academic writings made her a darling of the right-wing Federalist Society, a group that has funneled more than 200 conservative jurists to the federal courts under President Trump. style="width: 100%; height: 100%; position: absolute; top: 0; bottom: 0; right: 0; left: 0;">