Boosted by the appointment of former professor Amy Coney Barrett to the high court, the University of Notre Dame Law School has increasingly close ties with conservative justices.
SOUTH BEND, Ind. — Tucked within a Gothic-style building on campus in this small town is a Catholic institution increasingly exerting conservative influence on the Supreme Court: the University of Notre Dame Law School.
The school counts among its former faculty Justice Amy Coney Barrett, who swapped the faux-medieval halls of one institution for the neoclassical marble columns of another in helping form the 6-3 conservative majority on the court.
In a trend that started before Barrett’s appointment but has accelerated since, the school is now having success placing both students and professors in prestigious Supreme Court clerkships. The clerks serve one-year terms and play a low-profile but crucial role in advising their bosses on which cases to take up and how to rule on them. They do research, help craft decisions and serve as sounding boards for the justices.
The nation’s elite law schools — particularly Harvard and Yale — have dominated filling clerkships at the Supreme Court and educating the lawyers who went on to be nominated to the court for decades. In the competition for students and prestige, law schools have worked to propel their students into clerk jobs. Conservative criticism of academia, particularly targeting the nation’s elite universities, has grown, presenting an opening for more conservative-minded schools to gain prominence with a more conservative court.
Hiring clerks from law schools steeped in the prevailing conservative thinking known as originalism — a philosophy often frowned upon in more liberal-leaning law schools — ensures that the justices who hire them have like-minded aides who have been armed by their professors with novel legal approaches on the most pressing issues. Originalist theories have underpinned some of the court’s biggest rulings in recent years, including the decision that overturned abortion rights landmark Roe v. Wade and others that have controversially expanded the right to own firearms.
The relationship produced by Notre Dame faculty helps seed conservative legal theories. Professors are also involved in crafting litigation that can make its way before the court dealing with causes that are popular on the right, such as those encompassed by the term “religious liberty.”
Several Notre Dame professors, for example, filed briefs in the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization case urging the justices to overturn Roe. One of those briefs, filed by a retired Notre Dame professor, John Finnis, was cited by conservative Justice Samuel Alito in the 2022 ruling. Separately, the school’s religious liberty clinic has cases before the high court, including one pending appeal urging the justices to endorse a taxpayer-funded Catholic charter school in Oklahoma in a direct challenge to the separation of church and state.
The exchange goes both ways. Justices, mostly conservatives but at times liberals too, have become frequent visitors and guest lecturers at the school, which prides itself on being a safe space for conservatives. Within the last two years, Barrett and fellow conservative Brett Kavanaugh have both been on campus, as has liberal Justice Elena Kagan.
It is not unusual for law schools to have personal connections with justices. Kagan, for example, previously served as dean of Harvard Law School. Several justices regularly teach classes at different law schools.
The school has become “a bastion for conservative Catholic principles,” said Marci Hamilton, a former Supreme Court law clerk for the late Justice Sandra Day O’Connor and a professor who studies religion at the University of Pennsylvania.
‘Doesn’t openly discriminate’
On a recent late-summer day, all eyes in South Bend were focused on the upcoming home game of the storied Notre Dame football team, with groundskeepers on the campus north of the city steadily at work before thousands of Fighting Irish fans descended from around the country. Members of the football team could be seen jogging to the practice facility while other students headed to class.
The law school building is just yards from the golden-domed administrative building and the Basilica of the Sacred Heart Church, two centerpieces of the campus along with the iconic football stadium.
Seated in his book-lined study on the second floor, the law school’s dean, G. Marcus Cole, alternated between pride at recent achievements and indignation at the idea that the faculty skews disproportionately to the right. The problem, he said, is that most law schools lean heavily to the left and do not reflect America as a whole.
