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When was Justice Barrett not in the majority?

Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Brett Kavanaugh each landed in the majority 95% of the time during the 2025-26 term. But right behind them was Justice Amy Coney Barrett, at 92%. She was in dissent in five cases. (This is a slight increase from last year, when she was in the majority 89% of the time.)

While Roberts did not write separately in any of the three cases in which he was not in the majority, and Kavanaugh authored only a single dissent in one of his three, Barrett was more vocal: She wrote dissents – in T.M. v. University of Maryland Medical System Corp., Chatrie v. United States, and Trump v. Cook– and joined her colleagues’ dissents in Bowe v. United States and Pitchford v. Cain.

Barrett’s first break with the majority came in a 5-4 January decision resolving two complicated questions about federal habeas procedure. Justice Sonia Sotomayor, writing for the court in Bowe, held that the block on filing cert petitions in 28 U.S.C. § 2244(b)(3)(E) does not reach federal inmates clearly enough to strip the court of jurisdiction, leaving them free to ask the Supreme Court for review if an appellate panel denies them permission to file a successive motion – and that Section 2244(b)(1)’s bar on refiling the same claim does not reach federal inmates. Justice Neil Gorsuch dissented, arguing in Part I of his dissent that the statute’s text and structure extend the entirety of Section 2244(b)(3) to federal prisoners. In Part II of his dissent, he argued that the bar on repeat claims reaches federal prisoners, too. Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito joined in full; Barrett joined only Part I, the jurisdictional argument.

In late May, the court reversed and remanded in Pitchford, which concerned a Mississippi man sentenced to death. The 1986 case of requires a judge, when the defendant raises a claim that the peremptory strikes of jurors were conducted for race-based reasons, to run a three-step inquiry: the defendant makes a preliminary showing of discrimination, the prosecutor gives a race-neutral reason for each strike, and then the defense gets a chance to argue that reason is a pretext. Here, after the prosecutor struck four of the five Black prospective jurors, the trial judge seemingly declared his reasons to be race neutral and moved on, never reaching that third step. The Supreme Court held 5-4 that the Mississippi Supreme Court was unreasonable in ruling that Terry Pitchford had waived his chance to argue pretext. Kavanaugh wrote for the majority, joined by Roberts, Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, and Ketanji Brown Jackson. Barrett joined Gorsuch’s dissent in full alongside Thomas and Alito. Specifically, Gorsuch wrote that federal habeas law gave the state court far more room than the majority allowed, and that Pitchford had never made the pretext argument at trial in the first place.

Then, in June, Barrett released her first dissent of the term.

The court held 5-4 in T.M. v. University of Maryland Medical System Corp. that the Rooker-Feldman doctrine, which generally prevents federal district courts from reviewing state-court judgments, applies even when the state-court judgment is still subject to further review in state court. In a 12-page dissent, joined by the (unusual) trio of Roberts, Kagan, and Gorsuch, Barrett wrote that the doctrine “stands on shaky ground” and that prior caseshad deliberately kept its “footprint small” by confining it to suits filed “after the state proceedings ended.” “Still, the news is not all bad,” she wrote, because the majority “repeatedly emphasizes that the doctrine is ‘narrow.’”

Later in June, the court ruled 6-3 in Chatrie that law enforcement’s use of a geofence warrant to obtain Google location data was a “search” under the Fourth Amendment. Alito dissented, warning that the majority’s reasoning “will send seismic waves through our Fourth Amendment doctrine” even though it would not change the outcome for the petitioner in that specific case. Barrett joined Alito’s dissent as to several parts and also filed a dissent of her own. In a three-sentence opinion, Barrett wrote that she had “no quarrel with” Carpenter v. United States, the 2018 decision holding that police need a warrant to obtain historical cell phone records, or with the court’s decision to take the case. But she agreed with Alito that under existing precedent, including Carpenter, “Chatrie had no reasonable expectation of privacy” in data about his public movements that he had provided to Google.

Barrett dissented alone the same day in Cook, when the court denied the government’s application for a stay and left Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook in her seat. “[T]he constitutional status of the Federal Reserve is entirely outside the scope of this case,” she wrote, adding that the government “expressly waived any constitutional challenge to the removal restriction, so the parties did not brief it.” Barrett also asked how Cook was compatible with Trump v. Slaughter, allowing for the removal of a commissioner of the Federal Trade Commission, decided the same day: “How can history support both a categorical rule and a carveout?” Barrett asked.

Notably, four of the five cases in which Barrett dissented were 5-4 splits, with Barrett’s overarching theme being that the court should have decided the cases more narrowly (with the exception of Pitchford, where she would have had the state court’s ruling stand). As she put it in Cook, “[w]hile a modest approach would have been appropriate, the Court chooses to go big.”