Who Is Judge Neil Gorsuch? President Trump's First Pick For The Supreme Court?

Neil McGill Gorsuch, born August 29, 1967,  was a judge on the United States Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit. On January 31, 2017, President Donald Trump nominated Gorsuch to be an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States, to fill the seat left vacant after the death of Justice Antonin Scalia. Gorsuch is a proponent of originalism and of textualism in interpreting the constitution.

President Donald Trump announced Neil Gorsuch will be nominated to take the “Scalia Seat” on the U.S. Supreme Court. At 49, he will be the youngest Supreme Court nominee in 25-years. He is best known for upholding religious rights in court battles involving the Affordable Health Care Act (aka Obamacare). Gorsuch was appointed to the federal bench by President George W. Bush in 2006 as a member of the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals in Denver.

According to SCOTUSblog, Gorsuch “is celebrated as a keen legal thinker and a particularly incisive legal writer, with a flair that matches — or at least evokes — that of the justice whose seat he would be nominated to fill.”

In fact, in a study called Searching for Justice Scalia: Measuring the ‘Scalia-ness’ of the Next Potential Member of the U.S. Supreme Court, Gorsuch earned high marks in several categories important to the late Justice Scalia, including “originalism” and “textualism.” Like Scalia, Gorsuch has gained notoriety for his lively judicial writing style.

On Religious Freedom 

As an appellate judge, Gorsuch participated in the high profile religious test cases of Hobby Lobby Stores v. Sebelius and Little Sisters of the Poor Home for the Aged v. Burwell.

Gorsuch argued the the conception mandate of the ACA (Obamacare) was a burden on the religious free exercise rights in violation of the Religious Freedom Restoration Act of 1993. In Little Sisters, Gorsuch took the position that the 10th Circuit majority failed to show sufficient deference to the tenants of the Little Sister‘s beliefs and the Supreme Court later mostly agreed with this decision — remanding it for a solution between the parties and the Court on how to accommodate the Little Sisters beliefs while still giving rights to employees to receive contraception coverage.

Early life and education

Gorsuch is the son of David Gorsuch and Anne Gorsuch Burford (née Anne Irene McGill), a Republican and states’ rights proponent, who, under President Ronald Reagan, was the first female head of the United States Environmental Protection Agency from 1981 to 1983, when she was forced to resign for failure to turn over documents to Congress related to the alleged mishandling of Superfund. Neil Gorsuch was born in Denver, Colorado but moved to Washington, DC as a teenager, after his mother was appointed to the EPA.

In 1985, he graduated from the Georgetown Preparatory School. He received a B.A. from Columbia University in 1988. While a student at Columbia University, he wrote columns for the Columbia Daily Spectator student newspaper and was a fan of the Columbia University Marching Band. In 1986, he co-founded the alternative Columbia student newspaper, The Fed. He earned his J.D. from Harvard Law School in 1991,^[ where he received a Truman Scholarship. He received a Doctor of Philosophy in Law from University College at Oxford University in 2004, where he received a Marshall Scholarship.

Career

Gorsuch clerked for Judge David B. Sentelle on the United States Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit from 1991–1992, and then for United States Supreme Court Justices Byron White and Anthony Kennedy from 1993–1994.

From 1995–2005, Gorsuch was a lawyer at the Washington, D.C. law firm of Kellogg, Huber, Hansen, Todd, Evans & Figel. He was an associate from 1995–1997 and a partner from 1998–2005.

While he was a partner at the firm, Gorsuch wrote a brief denouncing class action lawsuits by shareholders. In the case of Dura Pharmaceuticals v. Broudo, Gorsuch opined that “The free ride to fast riches enjoyed by securities class action attorneys in recent years appeared to hit a speed bump” and that “the problem is that securities fraud litigation imposes an enormous toll on the economy, affecting virtually every public corporation in America at one time or another and costing businesses billions of dollars in settlements every year”.

He served as Principal Deputy to the Associate Attorney General, Robert McCallum, at the U.S. Department of Justice from 2005 until 2006.

United States Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit

On May 10, 2006, Gorsuch was nominated by President George W. Bush to the seat on the United States Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit vacated by Judge David M. Ebel when he took senior status. Like Gorsuch, Ebel was also a former clerk of Supreme Court Justice Byron R. White. Just over two months later, on July 20, 2006, Gorsuch was confirmed by voice vote in the U.S. Senate. Gorsuch was President Bush’s fifth appointment to the Tenth Circuit.

Since he took office, Gorsuch has sent some of his law clerks on to become Supreme Court clerks, and he is sometimes regarded as a “feeder judge”.

Freedom of religion

Gorsuch advocates a broad definition of religious freedom and sided with Christian employers and religious organizations in the cases of Burwell v. Hobby Lobby Stores, Inc. and the case of Little Sisters of the Poor Home for the Aged v. Burwell, later consolidated into Zubik v. Burwell. In the Hobby Lobby case, Gorsuch held that the requirement in the Affordable Care Act that employers provide insurance coverage for contraceptives without a co-pay violated the rights of those employers that object to use of contraceptives on religious grounds. He wrote: “The ACA’s mandate requires them to violate their religious faith by forcing them to lend an impermissible degree of assistance to conduct their religion teaches to be gravely wrong.”

In his dissent of the 2007 case Summum v. Pleasant Grove City, which was affirmed by the Supreme Court, Gorsuch took the view that displaying a religious monument, such as the Ten Commandments, did not obligate a governmental authority to display other offered monuments, such as those from other religions.

Gorsuch has written that “the law … doesn’t just apply to protect popular religious beliefs: it does perhaps its most important work in protecting unpopular religious beliefs, vindicating this nation’s long-held aspiration to serve as a refuge of religious tolerance”.

Authority of federal agencies

In writing his opinion for Hugo Rosario Gutierrez-Brizuela v. Loretta E. Lynch, Gorsuch postulated that the 1984 case of Chevron U.S.A., Inc. v. Natural Resources Defense Council, Inc., which gives federal agencies (and not the courts) the authority to interpret ambiguous laws and regulations, should be reconsidered. In his opinion, Gorsuch wrote that the practice of administrative deference established by the Chevron case is “more than a little difficult to square with the Constitution of the framers’ design.” The impact of an overturn of the Chevron case would be to shift power from federal agencies to the courts.

In the 2008 case of United States of America v. Shawn Lloyd Hinckley, Gorsuch argued that one possible reading of the Sex Offender Registration and Notification Act likely violates the nondelegation doctrine. Antonin Scalia and Ruth Bader Ginsberg held the same view in their 2012 dissent of Reynolds v. United States.

Interstate commerce

Gorsuch has been an opponent of the dormant commerce clause, which allows state laws to be declared unconstitutional if they too greatly burden interstate commerce. In his opinion for the 2015 case of Energy and Environmental Legal Institute v. Joshua Epel, Gorsuch opined that Colorado’s mandates for renewable energy did not violate the commerce clause by putting out-of-state coal companies at a disadvantage. Gorsuch wrote that the Colorado renewable energy law “isn’t a price-control statute, it doesn’t link prices paid in Colorado with those paid out of state, and it does not discriminate against out-of-staters”.

Criminal law

In the 2012 case of United States of America v. Miguel Games-Perez, Gorsuch ruled on a case where a felon owned a gun in a jurisdiction where gun ownership by felons is illegal; however, the felon did not know that he was a felon at the time. Gorsuch concurred with the opinion that “The only statutory element separating innocent (even constitutionally protected) gun possession from criminal conduct in §§ 922(g) and 924(a) is a prior felony conviction. So the presumption that the government must prove mens rea here applies with full force.”

Death penalty

Gorsuch favours a strict reading of the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996. In a 2003 case, Gorsuch denied requests of death-row inmates seeking to escape executions.

Nomination to the U.S. Supreme Court

In September 2016, during the U.S. presidential election, then-candidate Donald Trump included Gorsuch, as well as his circuit colleague Timothy Tymkovich, in a list of 21 current judges whom Trump would consider nominating to the Supreme Court if elected. In January 2017, after President Trump was elected, some unnamed Trump advisers listed Gorsuch in a shorter list of eight of those names, who they said were the leading contenders to be nominated to replace the seat vacated by the late Justice Antonin Scalia.

On January 31, 2017, President Trump announced his nomination of Gorsuch to the Supreme Court.

Legal philosophy

Gorsuch is a proponent of originalism, the idea that the Constitution should be interpreted as the Founding Fathers would have interpreted it, and of textualism, the idea that statutes should be interpreted literally, without considering the legislative history and underlying purpose of the law.

Judicial Activism

In a 2005 speech at Case Western Reserve University, Gorsuch said that judges should strive “to apply the law as it is, focusing backward, not forward, and looking to text, structure, and history to decide what a reasonable reader at the time of the events in question would have understood the law to be—not to decide cases based on their own moral convictions or the policy consequences they believe might serve society best.”

In a 2005 article published by National Review, Gorsuch argued that “American liberals have become addicted to the courtroom, relying on judges and lawyers rather than elected leaders and the ballot box, as the primary means of effecting their social agenda” and that they are “failing to reach out and persuade the public”. Gorsuch wrote that, by relying on judges instead of elected officials and the ballot box to enact their agenda, American liberals are circumventing the democratic process on issues like gay marriage, school vouchers, and assisted suicide, and this has led to a compromised judiciary, which is no longer independent. Gorsuch wrote that American liberals’ “overweening addiction” to using the courts for social debate is “bad for the nation and bad for the judiciary”.

States’ rights

Gorsuch was described by Justin Marceau, a professor at the University of Denver’s Sturm College of Law, as “a predictably socially conservative judge who tends to favor state power over federal power”. Marceau added that the issue of states’ rights is important since federal laws have been used to reel in “rogue” state laws in civil rights cases.

Abortion

Gorsuch has never had the opportunity to write an opinion on Roe v. Wade. However, based on his opinions expressed in his books opposing euthanasia and the taking of human life, people on both sides of the abortion debate presume he holds a pro-life stance.

Euthanasia

In his book The Future of Assisted Suicide and Euthanasia, Gorsuch argued for “retaining the laws banning assisted suicide and euthanasia … based on the idea that all human beings are intrinsically valuable and the intentional taking of human life by private persons is always wrong”.

Personal life

Gorsuch and his wife, Louise, have two daughters, Emma (born 1999) and Belinda (born 2001), and live in Boulder, Colorado.

Gorsuch enjoys being outdoors and fly fishing. He raises horses, chickens, and goats, and often arranges ski trips with colleagues and friends.

He was a Thomson Visiting Professor at the University of Colorado Law School.

Gorsuch has authored two books. His first book, The Future of Assisted Suicide and Euthanasia, was published by Princeton University Press in July 2006. Gorsuch wrote in the book that euthanasia should not be legalized in any form. In 2016, he received $304 in royalties for this book. He is also one of 12 co-authors of The Law of Judicial Precedent, published by Thomson West in 2016. He was paid $5,000 in 2016 as a result of his work on this book.

Source:

LesGrossman News

http://www.npr.org/2017/01/31/511850519/who-is-neil-gorsuch-trumps-first-pick-for-the-supreme-court

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neil_Gorsuch