Neil Gorsuch, named on Tuesday as US President Donald Trump’s nominee to the US Supreme Court, has a solidly conservative pedigree that has earned him comparison with the combative justice he would replace, Antonin Scalia.
Gorsuch clerked for two Supreme Court justices and worked in former US president George W. Bush’s Department of Justice before being appointed to the federal bench and authoring a series of sharply written, conservative opinions.
Gorsuch has also won praise among liberals and others in the Colorado legal community for his fair-mindedness and defense of the underdog.
“He is a very smart man. His leanings are very conservative, but he’s qualified to be on the Supreme Court,” Denver plaintiff’s attorney David Lane said. “I don’t know that Judge Gorsuch has a political agenda and he is sincere and honest, and believes what he writes.”
A judge on the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals in Denver, Gorsuch lives in the hyper-liberal college town of Boulder and teaches at the University of Colorado’s law school there, also a progressive bastion.
“I think this should be Merrick Garland’s seat,” said Jordan Henry, one of Gorsuch’s students there and a self-described liberal, referring to former US president Barack Obama’s nominee for the vacancy last year, who was never considered by the Republican-controlled US Senate, but she described Gorsuch as an eager mentor, always solicitous of students’ opinions and with a brilliant mind.
Gorsuch is a Colorado native who earned his bachelor’s degree from Columbia University, then earned a law degree from Harvard.
He clerked for Supreme Court Justices Byron White and Anthony Kennedy before earning a philosophy degree at the University of Oxford and working for a prominent Washington law firm.
He served for two years in Bush’s justice department before Bush appointed him to a seat on the 10th Circuit in 2006.
Gorsuch has contended that courts give too much deference to government agencies’ interpretations of statutes, a deference that stems from a Supreme Court ruling in a 1984 case. More recently, he sided with two groups that successfully challenged the Obama administration’s requirements that employers provide health insurance that includes contraception.
Gorsuch summed up his minimalist judicial philosophy and focus on impartial judgement on Tuesday evening.
“A judge who reaches every outcome he wishes is likely a very bad judge,” he said after Trump introduced him from the East Room of the White House in a primetime televised address.
He also wrote a book arguing against assisted suicide.
In his financial disclosure report for 2015, he reported assets ranging from US$3.1 million to US$7.25 million.
He earned US$5,300 in book royalties that year.
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