How Conservative Is Neil M. Gorsuch?
The wildcard, measured: every vote since 2017, the flattest agreement chart on the Court, and the 38 times he left the bloc — 28 of them landing left.
Conservative — and the least predictable justice on the Court. His record sits 8.5 points right of the colleagues who heard the same cases, but he left a near-united conservative bloc 38 times in 125 cases (30.4%) — the highest break rate measured on any of these pages, a third again Thomas’s — and 28 of the 38 landed on the liberal-coded side. Every other justice profiled here appears on someone’s page as the odd companion. Gorsuch is the odd companion on all of them.
The record, against every justice since 1946
The Supreme Court Database codes each vote liberal or conservative, issue by issue, under definitions explained here. Gorsuch’s share is 40.7% liberal across 496 coded votes since 2017 — 8.5 points below the same-case baseline — though he sits just under the 500-vote bar the site’s career rankings require, so no rank is printed for him yet. The shape of the record is stranger than the average: his most conservative subject is economic activity (37.4% liberal against 46.1%), while in criminal procedure — the subject that most separates Thomas and Alito from their colleagues — he stands at 43.8% against 50.5%, nearly at the baseline, which is exactly what 38 breaks worth of jury and lenity votes look like in aggregate.
The scholarly Martin–Quinn score makes the same point from outside: 0.625 units from the Court’s median over the last three terms — far nearer the center than Thomas (2.613) or Alito (2.039), and the lowest bloc-alignment figure on the Court by that study’s measure.
Where he sits on the current Court
Agreement in divided cases, the 2020 through 2024 terms — how often each colleague was on Gorsuch’s side of the judgment when the Court split:
The flattest chart on any of these pages. Every other profiled justice has a bar in the eighties and a bar near twenty; Gorsuch’s run from 69.7% (Alito) to just 31.8% (Sotomayor) — a spread of 37.9 points where the others’ approach sixty. He agrees with the Chief Justice and Kavanaugh at identical rates, and he is the only justice profiled whose closest colleague sits under seventy percent and whose furthest sits above thirty. No one on the Court is his reliable partner; no one is his reliable opposite.
When he breaks from the bloc
Same test as the other conservative pages: a divided case in which at least four of the other five Republican appointees voted together and Gorsuch voted the other way. It happened 38 times in 125 such cases across the 2020 through 2024 terms — 30.4%, the highest rate of the six justices profiled so far (Thomas 22.4%, Jackson 13.1%, Alito 11.8%). 30 came as dissents and 8 as majorities the bloc had left — 4 of those majorities in the 2024 term alone, each time supplying a fifth vote beside the liberals.
And the direction is the reverse of every other conservative’s page: the database codes 28 of the 38 breaks liberal and 10 conservative. When Thomas leaves the bloc he usually stands to its right; when Gorsuch leaves, three times out of four he lands beside the liberals — on texts, on treaties, on juries.
The treaties are law
7 of the 38 breaks are Indian-law cases — the largest single-subject cluster on any of these pages, and the continuation of the line he opened in McGirt(“On the far end of the Trail of Tears was a promise”). When the Court let Oklahoma prosecute crimes against Indians in Indian country, his Castro-Huerta dissent for the liberals began: “Where this Court once stood firm, today it wilts.” He wrote for the Pueblo in Ysleta del Sur, for the Navajo Nation’s water in dissent, against double-prosecution by CFR courts in Denezpi, alone for tribal sovereign immunity in Lac du Flambeau, and with the liberals for the tribes’ health-program funding in San Carlos Apache. Even his Chehalis dissent — nominally against Native corporations — is the same principle: recognition, like a treaty, means what it says.
Texts, juries, and the accused
The criminal and immigration breaks apply Bostock’s rule — “Only the written word is the law, and all persons are entitled to its benefit” — to people the bloc’s majorities ruled against. He read the safety valve for the defendant in Pulsifer, the elements clause in Delligatti, the First Step Act in Hewitt; he kept immigration decisions reviewable in Patel, Campos-Chaves and Riley, and wrote Velázquez for a man whose deadline fell on a Saturday. The jury cases bracket the list — Erlinger, which he wrote outside this break set, and Perttu, where he joined the liberals to hold the Prison Litigation Reform Act does not take intertwined facts from the jury. His 2024 book on the human toll of too much law reads as the theory; these votes read as the practice.
The procedural loner
The six solos are their own genre. Two would simply have dismissed the case and left the question to the rules committee (Kemp, Parrish). The others defend whoever the government’s machinery just rolled past: a dual-status Guard technician’s benefits (Babcock), a tribe’s immunity (Lac du Flambeau), a bankruptcy trustee’s claim (Miller), and the Tax Court’s power to call the IRS to account (Zuch: “Nothing in the statute before us suggests that the IRS can deprive the Tax Court of jurisdiction simply by withdrawing a levy”). His 10 rightward breaks, by contrast, are almost all in company — Alito on standing and appropriations, Thomas on realized income and the capital would-grants, the Chief Justice on Clean Air Act venue.
A bloc of one
Form-wise he is between the poles: 30 of the 38 breaks were dissents, but unlike Alito he will carry a majority across (8 times), and unlike Thomas his dissents usually have company from the other side of the aisle. Career-wide he has 8 solo dissents in 520 recorded votes, and a dissent rate of 18.9% against a 17.7% baseline — barely above his colleagues’, because for every majority he leaves on the right he joins another on the left. The agreement chart is the summary: no partner, no opposite, and a vote neither side can count before argument.
The 38 breaks, case by case
Every case from the 2020 through 2024 terms in which at least four of the other five Republican appointees voted together and Gorsuch did not, oldest first.
Provided a fifth vote, joining Kagan’s plurality: a “violent felony” requires force aimed at another person, which reckless conduct is not.
Joined Alito’s dissent: the states had standing to challenge the Affordable Care Act, and the zeroed-out mandate could no longer be sustained as a tax.
Wrote the dissent (joined by Thomas and Kagan): Alaska Native corporations lack government-to-government recognition, so they are not “Indian tribes” under the statute.
Wrote the dissent (joined by Sotomayor): the black-site facts are public the world over, and a privilege built for secrets cannot be used to spare the government embarrassment.
Solo dissent: a dual-status technician serves by statute “as” a member of the National Guard — uniform, rank and all — and should keep the service exemption.
Wrote the dissent (joined by Breyer, Sotomayor and Kagan): the statute strips review of discretionary judgments, not plain factual errors — under the majority, “a federal bureaucracy can make an obvious factual error” and nothing can be done.
Joined Sotomayor’s majority: First Step Act resentencing courts keep their traditionally broad discretion.
Wrote the dissent (Sotomayor and Kagan joining most of it): a CFR court is an arm of the Interior Department, so trying the same man twice for the same act is double jeopardy.
Wrote the majority, with Barrett and the liberals: the Restoration Act bars on tribal land only the games Texas prohibits outright, so the Pueblo may run its bingo hall.
Wrote the dissent (Breyer joining, Sotomayor in most): a denial resting on a regulation later held unlawful is exactly the “clear and unmistakable error” veterans may invoke.
Wrote the dissent, joined by the liberals: “Where this Court once stood firm, today it wilts” — Oklahoma gained a jurisdiction over crimes against Indians that two centuries of law had denied it.
Dissented separately and alone-in-authorship, on jurisdiction: he would have dismissed without reaching the merits; Breyer’s dissent carried the other two liberals to the same side.
Solo dissent, about case management rather than merits: the reach of Rule 60(b)(1) belongs with the rules committee, and he would have dismissed the case as improvidently granted.
Joined Alito’s dissent: a state adjutant general’s department can act for a federal agency without becoming one.
Wrote the dissent, joined by the liberals: the 1868 treaty promised a viable homeland, a homeland needs water, and the Nation asked only that the United States identify the rights it holds in trust.
Dissented with Sotomayor and Kagan: an offense “relating to obstruction of justice” presupposes justice to obstruct — a pending proceeding.
Solo dissent: stripping tribal sovereign immunity takes an unequivocal statement, and a Code naming neither tribes nor anything like them should not be read to reach “every government, everywhere.”
Wrote the dissent (joined by Sotomayor and Jackson): the safety valve’s “and” means and, and reading it as “or” narrows relief Congress wrote broadly.
Joined Alito’s dissent: a bureau that funds itself forever, outside annual appropriations, escapes the purse-string control the Constitution demands.
Joined Jackson’s dissent (with Sotomayor and Kagan): the statute requires one compliant notice stating time and place; a later notice cannot cure the defective original.
Joined Thomas’s dissent: the Sixteenth Amendment reaches only realized income, and the Moores never received theirs.
Joined most of Jackson’s dissent (with Kagan): the drug schedules in force at the federal offense — not an earlier version — should decide what counts as a “serious drug offense.”
Wrote the dissent (joined by Sotomayor and Kagan): the evidence rule bars expert opinions about a defendant’s mental state, and the majority’s workaround lets them in by another door.
Joined the Chief Justice’s majority, with the liberals: the Indian Health Service must pay the contract-support costs tribes incur running the health programs they took over.
Joined Barrett’s majority, with the liberals: RICO’s “business or property” does not exclude losses merely because a personal injury sits upstream of them.
Joined Jackson’s dissent: Congress ordered real review of the VA’s benefit-of-the-doubt calls, and clear-error deference reads that command out of the statute.
Wrote the majority, with the Chief Justice and the liberals: a 60-day deadline that lands on a weekend runs to the next business day, as legal deadlines long have.
Wrote the dissent (joined by Jackson): a crime that can be committed by doing nothing does not have the “use of physical force” as an element.
Solo dissent: the sovereign-immunity waiver covers the trustee’s federal claim whole, and the government’s hypothetical defenses outside bankruptcy are beside the point.
Joined Jackson’s majority (with the Chief Justice, Sotomayor and Kagan): a vacated sentence has not “been imposed,” so First Step Act minimums govern the resentencing.
Joined Alito’s dissent: a list of factors a judge must weigh does not forbid weighing another, and no judge can realistically wall off retribution at revocation.
Joined the Chief Justice’s majority, with the liberals: when exhaustion and the merits intertwine, the Prison Litigation Reform Act does not take the question from the jury.
Wrote the dissent, joined by the Chief Justice: the Clean Air Act sends locally applicable actions to the regional circuits, and the majority’s look-to-the-reasoning test is unworkable.
Joined most of Sotomayor’s dissent (with Kagan and Jackson): in withholding-only proceedings, the Board’s denial of protection is the final order a person may ask a court to review.
Solo dissent: he would have dismissed the case and left premature-notice rules to the rules committee — his second case-management solo of these five terms.
Solo dissent: “Nothing in the statute before us suggests that the IRS can deprive the Tax Court of jurisdiction simply by withdrawing a levy” — a new tool, he warned, to avoid accountability.
With Thomas, would have heard the capital case rather than summarily vacate; the database codes the notation as a dissent.
Joined Thomas’s dissent: no holding of the Court clearly established the general due-process rule the majority found in Payne.
Questions
Is Neil Gorsuch conservative or liberal?
Conservative by the record — 40.7% of his coded votes are liberal against 49.2% for colleagues on the same cases — but no justice fits the bloc frame worse. He left a near-united conservative bloc 38 times in 125 cases (30.4%), the highest rate measured on any of these pages, and 28 of the 38 landed on the side the Supreme Court Database codes liberal. The Martin–Quinn score measures him 0.625 units from the Court's median — far closer to the center than Thomas or Alito.
Why does Gorsuch side with the liberal justices so often?
Method, not drift. His majority opinion in Bostock states the rule — “Only the written word is the law, and all persons are entitled to its benefit” — and the breaks apply it: criminal statutes read no wider than written (Pulsifer, Delligatti, Hewitt), immigration review kept open where Congress left it open (Patel, Campos-Chaves, Riley), juries protected (Erlinger, which he wrote, and Perttu). Where the text or the treaty favors the government's opponent, he goes where it points.
Is Gorsuch really the Court's best friend of Native American rights?
The break list says yes. 7 of his 38 breaks are Indian-law cases — Castro-Huerta (“Where this Court once stood firm, today it wilts”), Navajo Nation, Denezpi, Ysleta del Sur Pueblo (which he wrote), Lac du Flambeau alone, San Carlos Apache — continuing the McGirt line (“On the far end of the Trail of Tears was a promise”). Court-watchers have asked how an archconservative justice became the strongest voice for tribal rights in the Court's history; the answer he gives is that the treaties are law.
How often does Gorsuch agree with the other conservative justices?
Less than any of them agree with each other. His highest figure on the current Court is 69.7% with Alito — lower than any other profiled justice's top pairing — and his chart is the flattest measured here: 37.9 points separate his most frequent ally from his least (31.8%, Sotomayor), where the same gap runs sixty points or more on Thomas's and Sotomayor's pages.
Does Gorsuch dissent alone?
8 times in his career — behind Thomas (52), Sotomayor (18) and Alito (12) — and his six solos in this window are unlike anyone's: two would simply have dismissed the case and sent the question to the rules committee (Kemp, Parrish), and the others defend a dual-status Guard technician, tribal sovereign immunity, a bankruptcy trustee, and the Tax Court's jurisdiction against the IRS.
How this page is made
Every count comes from the Supreme Court Database (Spaeth, Epstein, Nelson, Martin, et al.), justice-centered, 2025 Release 01 (how the voting figures are made). Window, bloc and break definition are as on the other conservative pages. Coding caveats worth daylight: his solo dissent in Lac du Flambeau — for tribal sovereign immunity — is coded conservative under the database’s conventions, and the Hamm v. Smith would-grant notation is coded a dissent. His fingerprint sits just below the 500-coded-vote bar the career rankings require, so this page compares shares rather than ranks. Case notes were checked against the slip opinions at supremecourt.gov. Martin–Quinn figures as reported by Adam Feldman (Legalytics, 2026); the tribal-rights characterization from SCOTUSblog (2025), quoting Ilya Somin; the jury-trial characterization from Rory Little at SCOTUSblog (2025). Quotations: Bostock, McGirt, his dissents in Castro-Huerta, Patel and Zuch.