Neil Gorsuch

Neil Gorsuch

Neil McGill Gorsuch is an American jurist who serves as an associate justice of the Supreme Court of the United States. Born on August 29, 1967, in Denver, Colorado, he became a member of the Court after President Donald Trump nominated him on January 31, 2017. He has served since April 10, 2017. His public career belongs to a period of sharp legal debate over statutory meaning, constitutional interpretation, LGBT rights, Indian law, religious observance, and criminal juries.

Gorsuch grew up as the eldest of three children in a family of lawyers. His parents, Anne Gorsuch Burford and David Ronald Gorsuch, encouraged debate at home, sometimes spontaneously. Anne Burford served in the Colorado House of Representatives from 1976 to 1980, and in 1981 President Ronald Reagan appointed her as the first woman to serve as administrator of the United States Environmental Protection Agency. Gorsuch’s early schooling also shaped him. At Christ the King Roman Catholic School in Denver, moral lessons left an influence, and classmates remembered him for taking strong stances.

After his family moved to Bethesda, Maryland, Gorsuch attended Georgetown Preparatory School, where he joined debate, forensics, and international relations clubs and served as a United States Senate page in the early 1980s. He graduated in 1985 as student body president. At Columbia University, he studied history and politics, graduated cum laude in 1988, wrote for the Columbia Daily Spectator, and co-founded the satirical student publication The Fed. He then attended Harvard Law School on a Harry S. Truman Scholarship, graduating cum laude in 1991. At Harvard, he edited the Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy and took part in legal assistance programs, while being known as a committed conservative on a largely liberal campus.

Gorsuch’s legal training continued through clerkships and study abroad. He clerked for Judge David B. Sentelle of the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit from 1991 to 1992, then later for Justices Byron White and Anthony Kennedy from 1993 to 1994. He also studied at the University of Oxford as a Marshall Scholar and earned a doctorate in jurisprudence in 2004. His doctoral thesis, supervised by legal philosopher John Finnis, concerned the morality of assisted suicide. These experiences fit the pattern of a lawyer drawn to questions of text, morality, and legal authority.

From 1995 to 2005, Gorsuch worked in private practice at Kellogg, Hansen, Todd, Figel & Frederick, focusing on trial work and commercial matters including contracts, antitrust, RICO, and securities fraud. From 2005 until his judicial appointment, he served as principal deputy associate attorney general at the United States Department of Justice. President George W. Bush nominated him to the United States Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit on May 10, 2006. On the Supreme Court, he became the first justice to serve alongside a justice for whom he once clerked, Anthony Kennedy.

Gorsuch is best known for his support of textualism in statutory interpretation and originalism in interpreting the United States Constitution. Along with Justice Clarence Thomas, he is also an advocate of natural law jurisprudence. During his time on the Supreme Court, he has written majority opinions in major cases including Bostock v. Clayton County on LGBT rights, McGirt v. Oklahoma on Indian law, Kennedy v. Bremerton School District on personal religious observance while serving in an official capacity, and Ramos v. Louisiana on juries’ guilty verdicts. For readers, his words matter because they show a judge working from close attention to text, history, and legal principle.