Since her nomination to the Supreme Court, Justice Amy Coney Barrett has faced scrutiny from all sides.
She weathered a swift and strong backlash from former supporters this month when she joined Democratic-appointed justices to reject President Trump’s request to freeze foreign aid funds.
In the days after the decision, members of her family received threats at their homes, including a pipe bomb hoax.
But in a signal that she was not retreating from public view, Justice Barrett announced new details of her upcoming memoir on Friday, promising a book that would make the process of judging less of a “mystery.”
The book, the justice’s first, will be titled “Listening to the Law: Reflections on the Court and Constitution,” It is scheduled to be released in September by Sentinel Books, an imprint of Penguin Random House known for publishing works by conservatives like Donald Rumsfeld, Ann Coulter and Marco Rubio.
In an announcement by her publisher, Justice Barrett promised a personal look at her life since she joined the court in 2020. She said she would bring readers into her daily life, from the deliberation process to media scrutiny, as she “pulls back the curtain on judicial process, as well as on her path to the court,” the announcement said.
Justice Barrett did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
She will become the fifth sitting Supreme Court justice to publish a book, joining Justices Neil M. Gorsuch, Sonia Sotomayor, Clarence Thomas and Ketanji Brown Jackson. Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh has also signed a deal for what is expected to be a legal memoir that is likely to touch on his bruising confirmation fight. The publication date for his book has not been announced.
In recent years, book deals have become a lucrative source of income for the justices and one of the few ways to earn money outside their roles on the court allowed by their ethics guidelines.
The book deals often provide the justices with sums that far surpass their income from the court. The annual salary of an associate justice this year is $303,600, and that of the chief justice is $317,500.
Justice Barrett received a reported $2 million deal for her book shortly after joining the court. She reported in her most recent financial disclosures that she has so far been paid $425,000.
In her time on the court, Justice Barrett, the junior member of its conservative supermajority, has increasingly positioned herself as a crucial vote in some of the most high-profile cases.
Her vote in the federal aid case this month was part of a larger trend. In that case, she joined Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and the court’s three liberal members to form a majority in preventing Mr. Trump from freezing foreign aid while the courts further consider the legality of the move. In the term that ended in July, Justice Barrett was the Republican appointee most likely to vote for a liberal result.
Her personal life has also been a subject of intense interest. Mr. Trump selected her to join the Supreme Court during his first term after the death of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, a liberal icon.
Her confirmation process unfolded in a rush in the weeks before the 2020 presidential election and during the coronavirus pandemic. She was confirmed eight days before the election.
A mother of seven children, Justice Barrett had spent much of her career teaching at Notre Dame Law School before she was appointed in 2017 to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit.
A deeply religious woman rooted in a populist movement of charismatic Catholicism, she had been open about her beliefs on divisive social issues such as abortion.
Mr. Trump’s conservative base initially celebrated the justice for cementing the court’s conservative supermajority and for voting with the majority in 2022 to overturn Roe v. Wade, ending the constitutional right to abortion.
But in her time on the court, Justice Barrett has emerged as an independent voice, often questioning the approach of her conservative colleagues and writing important dissents joined by liberal justices.
