 When Donald Trump nominated Amy Coney Barrett to replace Ruth Bader Ginsburg on the Supreme Court, liberal Democrats screamed bloody murder about the legitimacy of appointing a justice this close to an election while calling attention to Barrett's Catholicism and anti-abortion animus. That looks like having three names is the only thing she and her predecessor have in common. But according to reason senior editor Jacob Sullum, when it comes to criminal justice and abortion, the two may have far more in common than conservatives and progressives seem to realize. Ruth Bader Ginsburg was about as good as you could reasonably expect a quote unquote liberal justice to be. She was generally sound on the Fourth Amendment, on the First Amendment when it came to issues of due process and criminal justice cases in general. Despite being attacked as a doctrinaire law and order conservative, Barrett says Sullum has issued opinions that track pretty well with Ginsburg when it comes to limiting the police. He points to one ruling in particular in which Barrett found that DEA agents didn't have a right to search a property when granted permission by a woman who didn't live there. So therefore this is an invalid search and therefore they can't use this evidence against the drug suspect. That's an example of a decision that would be traditionally condemned by conservatives where here you're letting the sky off in a technicality but in fact it's what the Fourth Amendment in my view at least requires. The bat's encouraging. In at least one case involving a detective who lied in a statement so that he could arrest an innocent man for murder, Barrett came down hard on his claim to qualified immunity which shields law enforcement officers from being sued for misconduct. And Barrett to her credit said no way, there's no way that you could have thought it was okay to lie in a probable cause after David. The guy that you victimized should have a chance to make that case in court. When it comes to abortion, Barrett has said that she thinks it's unlikely that the court will fully overturn Roe v. Wade even as she has criticized the ruling as an act of judicial overreach. Ruth Bader Ginsburg had similar reservations about the landmark 1973 case. Ginsburg had two main criticisms of Roe v. Wade. One was that she didn't think it took the right analytical approach instead of using this sort of vague notion of privacy protected by substantive due process, which really has no basis in the Constitution. She thought it should have been an equal protection argument that abortion laws discriminate against people based on sex. And she also thought that the Supreme Court went too far in preempting in a wholesale sort of way state abortion laws. Ginsburg thought that this led to an unnecessary federalization of the issue that led to a great deal of division and acrimony. And if the court had left a little bit more time for the issue to work its way through the democratic process, there wouldn't have been this sense that the Supreme Court had arbitrarily overridden decisions of state legislators who are trying to represent the opinions of their constituents. And I think Barrett would agree with a lot of that. I honestly don't know how she's going to approach abortion cases except to say that she probably will be receptive to upholding the sorts of laws that are apt to make their way to the Supreme Court, which have to do not with wholesale bans, but with various kinds of restrictions. On issues such as gun rights and federalism, Barrett would likely be much better from a libertarian perspective. Ruth Bader Ginsburg, like most people on the left, she had a blind spot when it came to the Second Amendment, which is after all part of the Bill of Rights. She agreed with her other liberal colleagues that the Second Amendment basically does not impose any limits on what governments can do in terms of gun control. The majority, of course, found otherwise, which I think was the right decision. She was also bad when it came to Congress's use of the Commerce Clause. One was Obamacare, where the issue was can the federal government, under the pretext of regulating interstate commerce, say you must buy government-approved health injures? I'm very compelling arguments against that notion. This is not interstate commerce, for one thing. Barrett is definitely going to be better when it comes to the Second Amendment. I suspect she will be better when it comes to property rights. I'm almost certain she's going to be better in terms of defining Congress's powers under the Commerce Clause. So those are ways in which I think she would definitely be better from a libertarian perspective. On Fourth Amendment, she looks pretty good. I can't say that she's better than Ginsburg on the Fourth Amendment. Ginsburg was good. But there are reasons to think Barrett will be better than Ginsburg on issues that libertarians care about and will be nearly as good or as good on other issues that progressives tend to care about.