Picture a female jurist who has consistently defied social expectations imposed on women and whose legal thinking is closely bound up with her faith. No, I’m not talking about Amy Coney Barrett, reported to top President Trump’s list of candidates to fill the late Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s seat. I’m talking about Ginsburg herself.

Ginsburg believed fervently that conventional expectations shouldn’t hinder women as they seek their full, fair share of public life. Nor was she shy about how her Jewish faith shaped her judicial mind. In an essay for the American Jewish Committee published in 1993, she wrote: “Laws as protectors of the oppressed, the poor, the loner, is evident in the work of my Jewish predecessors. . . . The biblical command ‘Justice, justice shalt thou pursue’ is a strand that ties them together.”

By those criteria, Barrett would make a most worthy successor to RBG. In nominating the 48-year-old Louisianan, the president would present the nation with an inspiring vision of what it means to be an American woman in 2020 — one that could by turns surprise and captivate the suburban women Trump is keen to court while also delivering for the GOP base.

Enlarge Image Federal Judge Amy Coney Barrettvia REUTERS“Amy represents an opportunity to showcase a generationally brilliant, special intellect — who also is a mom,” says O. Carter Snead, Barrett’s longtime faculty colleague at the Notre Dame law school, where Barrett also received her law degree.

Her rare combination of hyper-intelligence and humility is a matter of bipartisan consensus. “The smartest person in the room and also the most humble” was how Snead and two other sources intimately familiar with Barrett described her, echoing each other almost verbatim.

Harvard Law School prof Noah Feldman — a liberal who testified before Congress in favor of ­impeaching the president — hailed her as “a truly brilliant lawyer” in a 2018 column. Feldman should know. He and Barrett were members of the same class of Supreme Court clerks in 1998.

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The U.S. Supreme Court declined to review the case of a Christian high school student in Maryland who, despite threats of receiving a failing grade, refused to deny her faith by making a written profession of the Muslim conversion prayer known as the shahada.

The shahada states, “There is no god but Allah and Muhammad is the messenger of Allah.”

Caleigh Wood, an eleventh-grader in La Plata High School, a public school in La Plata, Maryland, was represented in the case by the Thomas Moore Law Center, nonprofit public interest law firm know for defending First Amendment rights – particularly those that violate the Establishment Clause of the U.S. Constitution.

As part of the school’s “World History” curriculum, the La Plata High School high school students were taught extensively about Islam and required to list the benefits of the religion.

Wood and other students were forced to view a series of pro-Islamic PowerPoint slides, including one that stated, “Most Muslims’ faith is stronger than the average Christian.”

The curriculum also taught:

• “Islam at heart is a peaceful religion.”
• Jihad is a “personal struggle in devotion to Islam, especially involving spiritual discipline.”
• “To Muslims, Allah is the same God that is worshiped in Christianity and Judaism.”
• “Men are the managers of the affairs of women.”
• “Righteous women are therefore obedient.”
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