Neil M. Gorsuch

The 113th justice occupies the most fought-over seat in modern memory, and the fight had nothing to do with him. Antonin Scalia (§103) died at a Texas hunting ranch on February 13, 2016; within hours the Senate's Republican leadership declared that no nominee of President Obama would be considered in an election year, and Merrick Garland, named that March, waited out the better part of a year without a hearing until his nomination expired with the Congress. What the blockade preserved, the 2016 election delivered. Yet the man who received the inheritance has spent his tenure declining to be anyone's dividend. He writes against both flanks; he and Thomas (§106) are the only Republican appointees who dissent more often than the average member of their own Court; and the source of his jurisprudence is not a movement's checklist but a suspicion of concentrated power that, alone among the justices, has a family address.

Neil McGill Gorsuch was born in Denver on August 29, 1967, the eldest of the three children of two Denver lawyers, David Gorsuch and Anne Gorsuch; his mother went on to serve two terms in the Colorado House. In 1981 President Reagan made his mother the first woman to run the Environmental Protection Agency, and the family moved east; what followed was a Washington education no civics class provides. Locked in a fight with Congress over Superfund documents the White House had ordered her to withhold, Anne Gorsuch became the first agency head in American history cited for contempt of Congress, and in March 1983 the administration let her resign to end the siege. Her fifteen-year-old son did not console her; he cross-examined her. 'You should never have resigned,' she recorded him saying, in a memoir whose title, Are You Tough Enough?, gives the family register. 'You didn't do anything wrong. You only did what the president ordered. Why are you quitting? You raised me not to be a quitter.' She died in 2004, before the son who thought she should have stood her ground began writing opinions about what the executive branch may order and what the law permits it.

He was student body president at Georgetown Preparatory School, class of 1985, two years behind Brett Kavanaugh (§114); the future colleagues have been circling each other since homeroom. He finished Columbia in three years, cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa, writing for the daily paper and co-founding a campus paper of his own, and took his law degree at Harvard in 1991, a Truman Scholar in the same class as Barack Obama. A clerkship with Judge David Sentelle of the D.C. Circuit came first, then a Marshall Scholarship to Oxford, where he began a doctorate in legal philosophy under John Finnis, the natural-law theorist, on the ethics of assisted suicide, and met Louise, the Englishwoman he married in 1996; the degree, finished in 2004, became a Princeton University Press book two years later. They raised two daughters outside Boulder, with the horses, goats, and chickens of a household that never really moved to Washington. He came home to clerk at the Supreme Court in October Term 1993, jointly for the retired Byron White, until then the only Coloradan ever to sit on the Court, and for Justice Anthony Kennedy (§104), in the same term that Kavanaugh served in Kennedy's chambers.

A decade of private practice followed at the Washington litigation boutique of Kellogg, Huber, where he made partner, and a year at the Justice Department as principal deputy associate attorney general. President Bush nominated him to the Tenth Circuit on May 10, 2006, and the Senate confirmed him by voice vote on July 20, with not a single recorded objection, a unanimity worth savoring in light of what came later. The decade in Denver built the record. In Yellowbear v. Lampert he ordered prison officials to justify denying a Native inmate access to a sweat lodge, the opinion of a judge who took religious-liberty statutes at their word. In the TransAm Trucking case he dissented alone to say the law as written let a company fire a driver who abandoned his broken trailer in subzero cold rather than freeze beside it; the 'frozen trucker' would follow him to his confirmation hearing. And in Gutierrez-Brizuela v. Lynch in 2016 he wrote the concurrence that made him famous in the law schools, naming 'the elephant in the room' and calling Chevron deference 'a judge-made doctrine for the abdication of the judicial duty.' The bureaucracy that had consumed his mother now had a standing adversary on the federal bench.

Trump announced the nomination on January 31, 2017. The hearings produced no wounds, only set pieces: Senator Franken spent his time on the frozen trucker, and the nominee gave the answer that became his creed, 'There's no such thing as a Republican judge or a Democrat judge, there's just judges.' Democrats, still furious over Garland, mounted the first successful partisan filibuster of a Supreme Court nominee; the Republican majority answered on April 6, 2017, by abolishing the filibuster for Supreme Court nominations; and on April 7 he was confirmed 54–45, with Democrats Joe Manchin, Heidi Heitkamp, and Joe Donnelly in support. On April 10 the Chief Justice (§109) administered the constitutional oath in private, and in the Rose Garden Justice Kennedy administered the judicial oath to his own former clerk, the first time in the Court's history that a justice would serve beside a justice for whom he had clerked.