Amy Coney Barrett takes aim at activist judges

Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett reminded judges that they must function as “referees, not kings,” in an excerpt from an upcoming book.

The 53-year-old nominated by President Donald Trump and serving on the high court since 2020, offered a word to the wise, cautioning judges to hold their own views in check while dispensing justice.

Her new book, “Listening to the Law,” is out September 9, and in an excerpt published by The Free Press, Barrett elaborates on separating personal views from the law.

People think the Supreme Court is about promoting justice. It’s really about judging what the law requires, writes Amy Coney Barrett for The Free Press. https://t.co/OSVzSAeS3r

— The Free Press (@TheFP) September 3, 2025

‘We judges don’t dispense justice solely as we see it; instead, we’re constrained by law adopted through the democratic process,’” Barrett wrote, according to The Free Press.

“Like Americans more generally, judges hold diverse views about the values by which a just society should live. Yet under the Constitution, the choice between these competing views is made by citizens in the democratic process, not by judges settling disputes,” she explained.

“On the bench, we must suppress our individual beliefs in deference to those that have prevailed in the enacted law,” Barrett added. “Our job is to protect the choices that citizens have made, even when we disagree with them…”

“They are referees, not kings, because they decide whether people have played by the rules rather than what the rules should be,” she wrote, referring to judges.

She pointed to the death penalty as one example of how there is sometimes a “collision” between personal views and the law.

“For me, death penalty cases drive home the collision between the law and my personal beliefs. Long before I was a judge-before I was even a member of the bar—I co-authored an academic article expressing a moral objection to capital punishment,” Barrett wrote. “Because prisoners sentenced to death almost always challenge their sentences on appeal, the tension between my beliefs and the law is not one that I could avoid as a young law clerk, much less now as a judge.”

“If I distort the law to make it difficult for them to impose the death penalty, I interfere with the voters’ right to self-government,” writes Justice Barrett on not letting her personal views clash with her duty as a judge. https://t.co/N8ygSh6wzM

— The Free Press (@TheFP) September 3, 2025

“The people who adopted the Constitution didn’t share my view of the death penalty, and neither do all my fellow citizens today,” she noted.

In discussing her book with CBS News’s Norah O’Donnell on “CBS Sunday Morning,” the SCOTUS justice explained that the Court’s decisions are not an “opinion poll.”

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Originally from New York, Powers graduated from New York University and eventually made her way to sunny South Florida where she has been writing for the BizPacReview team since 2015.

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