Legal expert sticks a knife in hopes Amy Coney Barrett will 'evolve' into a moderate

U.S. Supreme Court justice Amy Coney Barrett raised eyebrows with her dissent last week in a case involving the Environmental Protection Agency and criticizing her conservative colleagues' reasoning in other cases, but an expert cautioned that she wouldn't likely become more moderate.

Barrett lined up with her fellow Donald Trump nominees in most of the major cases this term that split along the ideological divide, but she sided with liberals in the EPA case, called justice Clarence Thomas "wrong twice over" in a majority opinion she joined and split with conservatives on part of the former president's immunity claim, reported the Washington Post.

“Justice Barrett is a conservative judge in multiple senses of the word," said Allison Larsen, who teaches at William & Mary Law School. "She certainly joins the court’s steps to the right in big cases. But she also appears to prefer a conservative (lowercase c) methodology that is risk-averse, careful and deliberate.”

The 52-year-old justice, who is both the youngest and newest conservative on the court, agreed with her liberal colleagues that prosecutors should be able to present a president’s immunized official acts as evidence in connection to the alleged wrongdoing and accused her fellow conservatives of “feeble” and “cherry-picked” arguments in the EPA case.

"She is far from the rigid conservative that some expected when she joined the court,” said attorney Gregory S. Garre, who served as solicitor general under George W. Bush.

But that doesn't mean that she will turn out like two past justices nominated by Republican presidents who drifted to the left over time, according to one prominent expert

“Justice Barrett is everyone’s favorite conservative justice to talk about these days. But if anyone thinks she will ‘evolve’ over to the left side of the court, they are mistaken,” said Irv Gornstein, executive director of the Supreme Court Institute at Georgetown Law.

“She is a conservative jurist through and through," Gornstein added. "She is not going to be the next Harry Blackmun or David Souter."