Alumnus Attorney Defends Law School Classmate Amy Coney Barrett

Alumnus attorney Raymond Tittmann (’94) is managing partner of the TittmannWeix law firm and — of particular interest at the moment — he was also a law-school classmate of Amy Coney Barrett, President Trump’s latest nominee for the United States Supreme Court. When critics of Judge Barrett began attacking her character, faith, and family, Mr. Tittmann decided to come to his friend's defense.

Last week, a group of alumni from Judge Barrett’s undergraduate college — few, if any, of whom had attended the college at the same time as the nominee, let alone knew her personally — signed a petition against her nomination. In response, Mr. Tittmann and some friends began soliciting signatures from fellow members of the Notre Dame Law School Class of 1997 on her behalf.

“The fact that the media were trying to make something out of [the petition] was so upsetting to so many of us who knew [Judge Barrett] as one of the most intelligent, hard-working, and kind people we’ve ever known in our entire lives — and that is across political spectrums,” said Mr. Tittmann on a recent appearance on the Dana Loesch Show. (See video, above.) “So we’ve been working on a letter, and we should be issuing that letter within the next couple of days. As far as we can tell, [it will have] more signatures from the class of a Supreme Court nominee” than any other in the history of the United States.

Calling her “one of the most saintly people I know,” Mr. Tittmann has nothing but praise for Judge Barrett’s character and intellect. “America is so lucky to have Amy as a nominee to the Supreme Court,” he said. “She’s so understated and so humble. She went about her work, was always looking out to help other students, and she would share her notes if they missed classes. She was competitive with herself, but there was no element of her that was competitive with the other students. She wanted to bring us all up together as a class. And I tell you, in law school, there is so much pressure to succeed, that is a very uncommon trait.”

Mr. Tittmann also spent a few moments correcting widespread misunderstanding about Judge Barrett’s judicial philosophy. “When people think that she is going to decide a case like abortion or Obamacare based on her personal beliefs, that’s 180 degrees wrong,” he explained. “By definition, what she stands for — and what originalism stands for — is a rejection of the notion that you should vote against Obamacare, for example, in the Court, because you don’t like Obamacare.” Rather, he added, originalism holds that judges “should interpret the Constitution for what it says.”