Neil McGill Gorsuch was born in Denver in 1967. His mother, Anne Gorsuch Burford, ran the EPA under Reagan — and resigned in a firestorm, an experience of Washington's brutality that her teenage son watched from the inside. He went east: Georgetown Prep, Columbia, Harvard Law (in Barack Obama's class), then a Marshall Scholarship to Oxford, where he studied under the natural law philosopher John Finnis.
He clerked for Byron White — the last Coloradan on the Court before him — and Anthony Kennedy, whose seat-mate he would improbably become. After a decade in private practice and a stint at the Justice Department, George W. Bush put him on the Tenth Circuit in 2006, at 38. In Denver he built the record that made his name: elegant prose, deep skepticism of administrative deference, and a running argument that Chevron — the doctrine requiring courts to defer to agencies' readings of the law — "permits executive bureaucracies to swallow huge amounts of core judicial and legislative power."
When Antonin Scalia died in February 2016, Senate Republicans held the seat open for a year. Trump nominated Gorsuch in January 2017; the Senate abolished the filibuster for Supreme Court nominees to confirm him.