Democrats worry that Supreme Court nominee Amy Coney Barrett, an originalist and textualist who clerked for Justice Antonin Scalia in the late 1990s, will emulate him if she is confirmed by the Senate.
In a 2018 opinion, Barrett concluded that an anonymous tip did not provide reasonable suspicion for police to stop a car in which they found a man with a felony record who illegally possessed a gun.
In another Fourth Amendment case, decided in 2019, Barrett concluded that federal drug agents violated the Constitution when they searched a suspected heroin dealer's apartment based on the consent of a woman who answered the door but did not live there.
In a 2018 opinion for a unanimous 7th circuit panel, by contrast, Barrett said it did not matter whether the warrant authorizing tracking software that identified users of a child pornography website was valid.
Another Barrett opinion that may give pause to civil libertarians is her 2019 dissent from a decision in which the majority held that state and federal courts had erred by rejecting a defendant's claim that prosecutors improperly withheld exculpatory evidence when they tried him for attempted murder.
While Barrett agreed that prosecutors should have revealed that the victim, whose testimony was crucial in obtaining a conviction, had undergone hypnosis prior to the trial, she thought the issue was not clear enough to override the determination of an Indiana appeals court.
When it comes to federal sentencing, an area where Scalia's Sixth Amendment views had a major impact, Barrett has repeatedly sided with criminal defendants who argued that their punishment was more severe than the law allowed.
https://reason.com/2020/09/30/scotus-could-use-more-skeptics-like-amy-coney-barrett/
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