Amy Coney Barrett warns of attacks on free speech in UK, discusses Dobbs decision

U.S. Supreme Court Associate Justice Amy Coney Barrett and Bishop Robert Barron recently discussed the similarity between liberal textual interpretations of the Bible and the U.S. Constitution during an episode of Barron's podcast that aired earlier this week.

Barrett, who was appointed by President Donald Trump to serve on the high court in 2020, also issued a warning regarding free speech in the United Kingdom and echoed the constitutional reasoning of her mentor, the late Justice Antonin Scalia, about why she voted to overturn Roe v. Wade in 2022.

Barron, who serves as bishop of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Winona-Rochester in Minnesota, noted during his interview with Barrett that "there are very interesting overlaps" between both biblical and legal hermeneutics, which he defined as "the philosophy of interpretation."

He noted that the father of hermeneutics is Friedrich Schleiermacher, a 19th-century Protestant German theologian who attempted to reconcile Christianity with the criticisms of the Enlightenment.

Barron traced some of the present-day battles over textual criticism at all levels to his influence, noting that Schleiermacher believed "the point of the interpreter is to know the mind of the author better than he knew his own mind." He offered the examples of how hermeneutics informed interpretation of the Bible, as well as other literature.

Barrett pushed back against such a worldview when it comes to interpreting law, emphasizing that the stakes of rightly interpreting the clear text of the U.S. Constitution are much higher because it governs the entire nation.

"In hermeneutics, if you're asking that question to Herman Melville, if you're asking it to William Shakespeare, the stakes are lower, right?" she said. "You're trying to understand the literary document. The stakes are high when you're trying to understand the basic rules that govern us as a society."

Barrett suggested that what is most important as a justice is reading the U.S. Constitution as it would have been understood by the informed reader at the time it was written and ratified by the states, without trying to probe the mind of its author.

"We owe a lot to [James] Madison; he drafted the Bill of Rights, we owe him a great debt," she said. "But with all respect to Madison, whatever Madison privately harbored in his mind, whatever he thought, say, the First Amendment might require, that's not the document that the state ratifying conventions ratified, right? That's what made it the law, not Madison writing it down on the page."

Barrett, who clerked for Scalia in the late 1990s, echoed Scalia's textual originalism when she touched on why she voted as she did in the court's 2022 ruling on Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization, which overturned Roe v. Wade and returned abortion law to the states.

She argued Roe v. Wade was based on a faulty understanding of the U.S. Constitution that attempted to read meaning into the text that was not there.

"The problem with Roe was … there's nothing in the Constitution, certainly, that speaks to abortion, that speaks to medical procedures," she said.

"The best defense of Roe — the commonly thought defense of Roe — was that it was grounded in the word 'liberty,' in the due process clause — that we protect life, liberty and property, [and] it can't be taken away without due process of law," she said.

During an interview in 2013 with British journalist Piers Morgan, Scalia offered a similar line of thinking to explain why he was "adamantly" opposed to the Roe v. Wade decision.

"Basically, because the theory that was expounded to impose that decision was a theory that does not make any sense," Scalia said. "That is, namely, the theory of 'substantive due process.' There's a due process clause in the Constitution, which says that no person shall be deprived of life, liberty or property without due process."

"That is obviously a guarantee not of life, not of liberty, not of property. You can be deprived of all of them, but not without due process."

"My court, in recent years, has invented what is called 'substantive due process' by simply saying some liberties are so important, that no process would suffice to take them away. And that was a theory used in Roe v. Wade, and it's a theory that is simply a lie," he added.

During her interview with Barron, Barrett also raised the alarm regarding the state of free speech in the U.K., which she noted does not have the protections of the First Amendment.

"Think about what's happening with respect to free speech rights in the U.K.," she said. "Contrary opinions or opinions that are not in the mainstream are not being tolerated, and they're even being criminalized. Because of the First Amendment, that can't happen here."