The mother of seven, beloved in her community and by Notre Dame students, is a sparkling intellect who is likely more conservative than the man she clerked for and revered, Justice Antonin Scalia.

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RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:

If confirmed, Amy Coney Barrett could move the Supreme Court in a far more conservative direction for generations. NPR legal affairs correspondent Nina Totenberg has this profile of the nominee.

NINA TOTENBERG, BYLINE: Amy Coney Barrett is, in political terms, the dream candidate for conservative Republicans and the nightmare candidate for Democrats. For Republicans, the 48-year-old judge is a young and personally unassailable nominee. A devout Catholic, she is the mother of seven, including a child with Down syndrome and two children she and her husband adopted from Haiti. She's beloved in her community and by her students at Notre Dame Law School, where she taught for 15 years and was voted best professor three times. Marcus Cole is dean of the law school.

MARCUS COLE: If you talk to students, the thing that I think stands out to them is that she really makes an effort to get to know them, understand them and help them.

TOTENBERG: And she's willing to go the extra mile when necessary - for instance, going to bat for Laura Wolk, a blind student who, upon entering the law school, found the school computer software didn't allow her access to law books and other legal material in a format she needed to read for her classes. As Wolk recounts, when she told Barrett about her dilemma, Barrett replied...

LAURA WOLK: This is one that I absolutely can take off of your plate.

TOTENBERG: And she did, says Wolk, getting the law school to quickly purchase the needed software. Barrett's busy schedule and her many roles leave people in South Bend scratching their heads and asking the question, how does she do it? She starts most days at the gym at 4 a.m., according to friends. Because the court she sits on meets in Chicago, she commutes regularly, driving an hour and 45 minutes to get there from South Bend.

Nobody seriously disputes Barrett's sparkling intellect and qualifications to serve on the Supreme Court. Rather, it is her work on the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals and her scholarly writing and commentary that have drawn such fervent opposition from the left and support from the right. It is the positions that she's taken over the years, from the anti-abortion, anti-gay marriage letter from Catholic women that she signed in 2015 to her judicial decisions since then. She's criticized the Supreme Court's 5-4 and 6-3 decisions upholding key sections of Obamacare, both opinions written by conservative Chief Justice John Roberts. Here she is, for instance, in 2015 on NPR.

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AMY CONEY BARRETT: I think the dissent has the better of the legal argument.

TOTENBERG: In a lecture at Jacksonville University a year later, prior to the election, Barrett warned that if Hillary Clinton were elected, the court would experience a sea change in ideology. But as Nan Aron, president of the liberal Alliance for Justice puts it, it is Barrett's ideology that now presents a potential sea change.

NAN ARON: Donald Trump has made it clear that his two qualifications for Supreme Court justice are that one, a candidate has to be opposed to Roe v. Wade, and two, the candidate has to, like Trump, do whatever she can to overturn the Affordable Care Act.

TOTENBERG: Aron and others contend Barrett's record fits the bill on both counts and much more. Barrett, in her Jacksonville lecture, said she expected the Supreme Court's Roe v. Wade decision would be hollowed out but not reversed.

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BARRETT: I think the question is how much freedom the court is willing to let states have in regulating abortion.

TOTENBERG: Just months after that speech, she was named to the 7th Circuit, where she dissented in an abortion case that, if she had prevailed, would have made it illegal in Indiana to get an abortion because of fetal disability. Now in 2020, if she's confirmed, Barrett would likely be a sixth conservative vote on the court, making it plausible that there is now a majority to overturn Roe v. Wade outright. University of Texas law professor Stephen Vladeck says he expects that with Barrett's confirmation, the court would be transformed into the most conservative court since the 1930s, a court that is much more aggressive in its conservative agenda.

STEPHEN VLADECK: When it comes to big-picture cases, running the spectrum from abortion to religion to campaign finance to everything, you know, there is no longer going to be, I think, any concern about a squishy median when you have six solid, conservative votes from which to find five.

TOTENBERG: Barrett closely identifies with the Supreme Court justice she once clerked for, the late Antonin Scalia, who, more than any other justice, popularized the idea of originalism, meaning that the court should interpret the Constitution and statutes as they were originally intended and written. But Scalia, at the same time, often referred to himself as a faint-hearted originalist because he also embraced one of the other building blocks of legal interpretation, namely adhering to precedent, even when, in his view, some of those precedents conflicted with what the Founding Fathers meant.

Judge Barrett's views on precedent, however, appear to be closer to those of Justice Clarence Thomas, who has little regard for precedent and has urged overturning many long-established decisions. Barrett's critics, for instance, point to her judicial writing in a major gun case. In 2008, the Supreme Court ruled for the first time that the Constitution guarantees the right to own a gun in one's home. But Justice Scalia, writing for the court, listed some exceptions, among them laws barring felons from owning guns. But when one of those felon laws came before Judge Barrett, she dissented, maintaining that the Supreme Court didn't really mean to exclude gun ownership for felons who were not dangerous. Nina Totenberg, NPR News, Washington.

(SOUNDBITE OF CONTEMPORARY NOISE QUINTET'S "MILLION FACES") Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.