Book reviews: ‘Listening to the Law: Reflections on the Court and Constitution’ and ‘Dark Renaissance: The Dangerous Times and Fatal Genius of Shakespeare’s Greatest Rival’

‘Listening to the Law: Reflections on the Court and Constitution’ by Amy Coney Barrett

Maybe the America we know still has a chance, said in The Washington Post . As Donald Trump ’s attacks on the U.S. constitutional system mount, “Amy Coney Barrett is the most important justice on the Supreme Court,” and in her first book, she lays out her judicial philosophy in a way that makes clear both why she occupies the very middle of the nine-member court’s current ideological spread and why the rule of law may withstand Trump’s assault. Liberal constitutional scholars like me reject one of the major pillars of her philosophy: originalism. But “unlike some of her conservative colleagues,” including those who see the late Antonin Scalia as a model, Barrett “takes seriously Scalia’s personal