Amy Coney Barrett Explains Why She Won’t Explain Her Recusals

Justice Amy Coney Barrett indicated Thursday that one reason she chooses not to explain why she recuses herself from cases for ethics reasons is because her friends or family could face unwanted public attention, threats or worse.

The comments from Barrett are a rare sign that a recent surge in threats against judges and their families are affecting how members of the Supreme Court carry out their official duties.

During a stop in Washington to promote her new book, Barrett was asked why some justices explain their decisions to recuse from cases, while others don’t.

“There are costs,” Barrett explained at an event staged by the Supreme Court-focused website SCOTUSblog.

Barrett, a Trump appointee, said most recusals are triggered by financial conflicts that are already disclosed in public filings made by all federal judges. And some are for pedestrian reasons; for example, when a judge or justice has already handled a case in the lower court and shouldn’t be reviewing her own rulings.

However, more nuanced scenarios that could lead to recusals, she noted, often involve the appearance of impropriety and can also relate to a justice’s friends or family members or what she called “deeply held convictions.”

“That's a tricky standard,” Barrett explained during an on-stage conversation with 9th Circuit Court of Appeals Judge Patrick Bumatay. “If you identify reasons, you have to do it across the board, right?”

Bumatay’s question about recusals was triggered by Barrett’s recusal last year from a high-profile case about the constitutionality of religious charter schools. Barrett is believed to have recused due to her friendship with an adviser to organizers of the Oklahoma school involved in the high court case. With Barrett absent, the justices deadlocked, 4-4, keeping in place a ruling denying state funding to the school, but leaving the broader legal issues unresolved.

While the current court is split 6-3 between conservatives and liberals, Chief Justice John Roberts has sided with the liberals in several high-profile disputes in recent years. Barrett has sometimes joined him and occasionally sided with the liberal wing, angering some Trump loyalists.

However, she recoiled Thursday at the suggestion she should now be considered a swing justice.

“A swing justice — that makes it sound like you sort of are swinging back and forth and you can't make up your mind,” Barrett said. “It's not like I'm thinking about an outcome and then trying to figure out a way to get there. I'm just kind of playing it straight. … I don’t think of myself as a swing justice.”

When it comes to criticism of her, Barrett insisted she’s “learned to tune it out.” But she conceded that it’s “very frustrating” when people ascribe one of her rulings to what she called “the Trump relationship” rather than the legal aspects of the case, pointing in particular to the majority opinion she wrote earlier this year reining in nationwide injunctions.

On two occasions during the hourlong discussion Thursday, Barrett mentioned that members of her family had pizzas delivered to them that they had not ordered.

Authorities interpreted the pizza orders as a threatening signal that someone hostile to Barrett knew where her family members lived. Around the same time, law enforcement also received an emailed bomb threat against Barrett’s sister who lives in Charleston, South Carolina.

Other judges handling prominent cases also received pizza orders. Explicit threats to judges also spiked earlier this year, coinciding with President Donald Trump’s calls for impeachment of some federal judges who ruled against the administration. Earlier this year, Trump called one well-respected federal judge a “radial left lunatic” and “crooked,” while repeatedly painting others as hopelessly biased.

The White House has said Trump is not endorsing any violence or threats. Recent statistics suggest the surge in threats may be leveling off.

Barrett did not mention Trump’s rhetoric Thursday, but said she feared that if she explained her recusals, her friends and family could be unfairly and unwillingly drawn into the spotlight or harassed.

“People can be mad at me for decisions, or lash out at me for the way I decide a case,” Barrett said. “But I have to think too about, well, is it really something I want to do … to identify that person and then put that person in that position? So, I just sort of feel like, when you think about the full range of reasons across the board, I don't know what might arise in the future, so it's just better not to say.”

Public explanations for recusals have been among the demands in recent years of critics calling for greater transparency at the historically secretive court, which Barrett described Thursday as the federal government’s “most transparent branch.”

Justice Elena Kagan, an Obama appointee, began providing brief explanations for recusals two years ago. The court’s two other Democratic appointees, Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson, now typically do so, while the court’s Republican-appointed justices generally do not.

In April 2023, all nine justices endorsed a statement of ethics principles that said they “may provide a summary explanation of recusals,” but in some cases it would be “ill-advised” to do so. Seven months later, the high court unanimously adopted a formal ethics code for the first time. But it makes no mention of whether recusals should or could be public.