Conservatives have a long history of being disappointed by Republican Supreme Court nominees, including Justices David Souter and Anthony Kennedy.

While some fear that Justice Amy Coney Barrett will join that list, one conservative legal scholar says those concerns are unfounded. 

Professor says Barrett "is becoming increasingly confident"

That argument was put forward by Northwestern University constitutional law professor John O. McGinnis in an article published this week by the website Law & Liberty.

McGinnis maintained that Barrett "is becoming increasingly confident as she enters her fourth year on the Court," something he attributes to an "intellect" shaped by "her time as an academic working on interpretive theory."

The law professor acknowledged that Barrett has sometimes used different reasoning than her fellow Republican appointees even as she reached the same conclusions.

As an example, he pointed to New York State Rifle & Pistol Association, Inc. v. Bruen, a 2022 case in which the Supreme Court found a constitutional right to carry a gun outside of one's home.

"Nothing in her discussion suggests Barrett is swerving left"

Whereas Justice Clarence Thomas and most of the other conservatives felt that gun laws must be analogous those which existed when the Constitution was adopted, Barrett was less certain.

Specifically, she "expressed doubt" over "whether the relevant evidence came from 1791 when the Second Amendment was passed or 1868 when it was incorporated against the states."

Nevertheless, McGinnis insisted that "nothing in her discussion suggests Barrett is swerving left," adding, "It is far more likely that she is simply trying to get originalist methodology right."

"In Vidal v. Elster, for example, Barrett, concurring in the judgment, attacked an abstract method of constitutional interpretation—history and tradition—that she believed Justice Thomas’s opinion employed," McGinnis wrote.

"While some conservative academics have endorsed history and tradition as an interpretive method, history or tradition divorced from the text of the enactment is not originalism," he declared.

Barrett has largely sided with her conservative colleagues

Washington Post columnist Ann E. Marimow shared a perspective similar to that of McGinnis in an op-ed piece published earlier this month.

While Marimow described Barrett as someone who "is charting her own path on the bench," the columnist pointed out that she has still "aligned with her fellow Trump nominees in most of the big cases that have ideologically divided the court."

These included finding that there is no constitutional right to abortion and invalidating race-based college admissions standards.