The Senate yesterday confirmed the nomination of Amy Coney Barrett to be the next Associate Justice on the Supreme Court, replacing Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg who passed away last month. The addition of Justice Barrett tilts the balance of the Court to the right, and politics aside, could have a significant impact for the credit and collection industry.
We have already looked at some of the rulings from Justice Barrett when she sat on the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals, especially those pertaining to the Fair Debt Collection Practices Act and the Telephone Consumer Protection Act. The case that is likely to carry the most weight — at least during Justice Barrett’s first few months on the bench — is her opinion in Gadelhak v. AT&T Services, in which she ruled technology that does not have the capacity to generate random or sequential numbers does not meet the definition of an automated telephone dialing system under the TCPA. The Supreme Court is due to hear arguments in a case that seeks to answer how to define an ATDS once and for all in December.
Despite the politics of Justice Barrett’s nomination, coming only weeks before a presidential election, her confirmation process was relatively smooth, without any major issues or roadblocks. Analyzing her rulings from the Seventh Circuit, one outlet labeled Justice Barrett as one of the court’s “most conservative judges” and said her appointment to the Supreme Court could be the third-biggest shift in the Supreme Court’s ideology in the past 70 years.
During remarks made last night at the White House after she was sworn in by Justice Clarence Thomas, she said, “it is the job of a judge to resist her policy preferences. It would be a dereliction of duty for her to give in to them. Federal judges don’t stand for election. Thus, they have no basis for claiming that their preferences reflect those of the people.”
