Justice Neil Gorsuch

Justice Neil Gorsuch joined the U.S. Supreme Court on April 10, 2017, replacing Justice Antonin Scalia. Gorsuch was born in Colorado on August 29, 1967. However, his family moved to an area of Maryland near Washington, D.C. when his mother was appointed as the administrator of the federal Environmental Protection Agency. After graduating from Georgetown Preparatory School in 1985, Gorsuch attended Columbia University. He graduated cum laude from Columbia in 1988, majoring in political science. Gorsuch received his law degree from Harvard Law School in 1991, again graduating cum laude. He would later receive a doctorate in law from the University of Oxford in the United Kingdom as well.

After graduating from law school, Gorsuch held two federal court clerkships. He clerked at the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit in 1991-1992, and he clerked for Justices Anthony Kennedy and Byron White at the U.S. Supreme Court in 1993-1994. (He ultimately would serve on the Court with both Kennedy and fellow clerk Brett Kavanaugh.) Gorsuch then practiced law at a private firm until 2005, when he joined the U.S. Department of Justice as Principal Deputy Associate Attorney General. In May 2006, President George W. Bush nominated Gorsuch to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit. The Senate confirmed him unanimously in July. Gorsuch wrote over 200 opinions for the Tenth Circuit during the next decade.

Republican President Donald Trump nominated Gorsuch to the U.S. Supreme Court on February 1, 2017, just 12 days after Trump took office. The seat to which Gorsuch was nominated had been vacant for almost a year after the death of Justice Scalia. Democrat President Barack Obama had sought to replace Scalia with D.C. Circuit Judge Merrick Garland, but the U.S. Senate refused to consider Garland’s nomination due to the impending 2016 presidential election.

Gorsuch began his confirmation hearings on March 20, 2017, and the Senate Judiciary Committee voted 11-9 in his favor on April 3. When Democrats in the Senate sought to block his confirmation via filibuster, the Republican majority in the chamber voted to change Senate rules so that filibusters of Supreme Court nominations could be broken with a simple majority. Gorsuch was then confirmed by a 54-45 vote on April 7 and received his commission on the following day. He took the constitutional oath of office and the judicial oath of office on April 10 in separate ceremonies.

Echoing his predecessor Scalia, Gorsuch follows the textualist theory of legal interpretation. This essentially holds that laws should be interpreted according to the ordinary meaning of their words, rather than the context surrounding them. Again like Scalia, Gorsuch adheres to the originalist view of Constitutional interpretation. This means that a provision in the founding document should be given the meaning that it would have had when it took effect.

Although Gorsuch belongs to the conservative bloc on the Court, he repeatedly has joined the liberal Justices in support of Native American rights. In McGirt v. Oklahoma, for example, Gorsuch held that land promised to a tribe by the U.S. government remained an Indian reservation for the purposes of federal criminal law.