Barrett hears first argument since joining highest court
WASHINGTON — Justice Amy Coney Barrett heard her first Supreme Court argument Monday, asking assured and probing questions in a case on the Freedom of Information Act.
Barrett joined the court last Tuesday, a little more than a month after the death of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg and the rushed and contentious confirmation process that followed President Donald Trump’s nominating her.
But Barrett sat out several major election disputes last week, saying she had not had time to review the parties’ filings. She also did not participate in the justices’ private conference last week, saying she needed time to prepare for this week’s arguments.
And with the court hearing arguments by phone Monday because of the pandemic, Barrett did not join her colleagues on the bench and take the junior justice’s traditional seat on its far right. But Chief Justice John Roberts did start Monday’s session by greeting the newest justice.
“It gives me great pleasure on behalf of myself and my colleagues to welcome Justice Barrett to the court,” he said. “We wish you a long and happy career in our common calling.”
Barrett is working in Ginsburg’s old chambers, and she has praised her predecessor as “a woman of enormous talent and consequence” whose “life of public service serves as an example to us all.”
Her first case concerned efforts by the Sierra Club, an environmental group, to obtain documents about harm to endangered species.
The federal government has resisted those efforts, saying the records were protected by an exemption to the freedom of information law shielding documents that would disclose deliberations before final decisions.
The dispute started in 2011, when the Environmental Protection Agency proposed a new regulation to govern cooling water intake structures, which can harm aquatic life. Under the Endangered Species Act, the agency was required to consult with two other units of the federal government — the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the National Marine Fisheries Service — to gauge and address harm the regulation would do.
Before the argument in the case, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service v. Sierra Club, No. 19-547, the court issued a pair of unsigned decisions, ruling for a Black Lives Matter activist and a prisoner subjected to abusive conditions. Justice Barrett did not participate in the decisions.
In the first, it vacated an appeals court ruling against DeRay Mckesson, a Black Lives Matter activist who helped organize a protest in Baton Rouge, La., in the summer of 2016 after the fatal shooting of a Black man, Alton Sterling, by two police officers.
In the second unsigned decision, the court ruled that Trent Taylor, an inmate in Texas, could sue corrections officers for holding him for six days in what he called “shockingly unsanitary cells.” The first, he said, was covered in feces. The second, he said, was frigidly cold and flooded with raw sewage.
The 5th Circuit ruled that the conditions violated the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition of cruel and unusual punishment. But the appeals court said the officers were entitled to qualified immunity because it had not been clearly established that “prisoners couldn’t be housed in cells teeming with human waste” for “only six days.”
The Supreme Court reversed. “No reasonable correctional officer could have concluded that, under the extreme circumstances of this case, it was constitutionally permissible to house Taylor in such deplorably unsanitary conditions for such an extended period of time,” the court’s opinion said.