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Justice Amy Coney’s ties to Notre Dame University run so deep that she’s literally planning on spending eternity there. The Swamp can reveal that the Trump-appointed Supreme Court Justice, who studied and taught law at the Indiana institution for years, has quietly purchased a plot at Cedar Grove Cemetery—the campus’ historic graveyard where generations of priests, professors, and alumni have been laid to rest.
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Cedar Grove isn’t your average cemetery. Opened in 1844, it’s one of the oldest Catholic cemeteries in the Hoosier state, and for decades it served only Holy Cross priests and nuns before opening to lay faculty and alumni.
Walk the 22 acres of grounds and you’ll find the graves of university presidents, war veterans, and Knute Rockne, an All-American player turned legendary football coach who led the Fighting Irish for 13 seasons, notching three national championships.
Barrett and her husband, Jesse, whom she met in law school, will one day join the cemetery’s roster.
It seems like a fitting place for the Notre Dame double alum, who served as a law clerk for the late Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia and then spent two years practicing law at DC-based litigation firm Miller Cassidy Larroca & Lewin before opting to return to the university as a professor.
“I thought it would be more compatible with raising a family,” says Barrett, who was the eldest of seven children and has seven of her own, including two adopted from Haiti.
Indeed, at an event in D.C. on Saturday to promote her new book, Listening to the Law, the 53-year-old said she never expected to leave South Bend when she first got the call from the Trump White House in 2017 to serve as a judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit.
She also initially hesitated three years later, when Trump’s White House counsel came knocking again following the death of liberal Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.
At first, Coney Barrett wasn’t sure about moving her children to Washington, and she knew the confirmation process would be bruising.
“When we decided to go through with it, Jesse said: ‘I’m in, one condition: that we burn the boats,’” Barrett says, referencing a military strategy used by Alexander the Great, who, after landing on the shores of enemy territory, ordered his men to burn the ships they had landed in.
The only choice was to forge ahead. “It was rough, but I just resolved not to look back.”
Just as well for Trump, who ended up getting his third Supreme Court pick and the 6-3 conservative majority that has overwhelmingly ruled in his favor since.
In recent years, the average Supreme Court justice lives into their eighties, so Coney Barrett won’t be settling down any time soon.
Still, when she does, it would be nice if she lands near Notre Dame alum and Cedar Grove’s most entertaining resident Regis Philbin.
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