Home
/
RELIGION & LIBERTY ONLINE
/
What you should know about Supreme Court nominee Neil Gorsuch
What you should know about Supreme Court nominee Neil Gorsuch
Apr 21, 2026 9:24 PM

Today the U.S. Senate confirmed the nomination of Judge Neil Gorsuchto replace the late Justice Antonin Scalia. President Trump will swear in Judge Gorsuchearly next week.

Here is what you should know about the nextassociate justice of the Supreme Court of the United States.

Neil Gorsuch

Age: 49

Birthplace: Denver, Colorado

Education: B.A. from Columbia University; J.D. from Harvard Law School; PhD in Law from University College at Oxford University.

Current judgeship:U.S. Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit (appointed by George W. Bush).

Previous roles: In the early 1990s, Judge Gorsuch clerked for U.S. Supreme Court Justices Byron White and Anthony Kennedy. He served in private practice at the Washington, D.C. law firm of Kellogg, Huber, Hansen, Todd, Evans & Figel, and served as principal deputy to the associate attorney general and acting associate attorney general, U.S. Department of Justice.

Religious denomination: Episcopalian

Family: Judge Gorsuch is married and has two daughters. His mother served as President Reagan’s head of the Environmental Protection Agency.

Judicial philosophy: Judge Gorsuch is considered a proponent of originalism, a manner of interpreting the Constitution that begins with the text and attempts to give that text the meaning it had when it was adopted, and textualism, a method of statutory interpretation that relies on the plain text of a statute to determine its meaning.

Positions and rulings

Religious Liberty:Gorsuch was on the Tenth Circuit when they heard the religious liberty case,Hobby Lobby Stores vs. Sebelius.The court ruled federal law prohibited the requirement from applying to closely held corporations, a position upheld by the Supreme Court. In his opinion Gorsuch wrote that theReligious Freedom Restoration Act applied to the owners of Hobby Lobby: “The Act 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.”

The Tenth Circuit also heard the case ofLittle Sisters of the Poor Home for the Aged vs. Burwell.In his dissent, Gorsuch wrote:

The opinion of the panel majority is clearly and gravely wrong—on an issue that has little to do with contraception and a great deal to do with religious liberty. When a law demands that a person do something the person considers sinful, and the penalty for refusal is a large financial penalty, then the law imposes a substantial burden on that person’s free exercise of religion. All the plaintiffs in this case sincerely believe that they will be violating God’s law if they execute the documents required by the government. And the penalty for refusal to execute the documents may be in the millions of dollars. How can it be any clearer that the law substantially burdens the plaintiffs’ free exercise of religion?

This is a dangerous approach to religious liberty. Could we really tolerate letting courts examine the reasoning behind a religious practice or belief and decide what is core and what is derivative? A Christian could be required to work on December 25 because, according to a court, his core belief is that he should not work on the anniversary of the birth of Jesus but a history of the calendar and other sources show that Jesus was actually born in March; a December 25 work requirement therefore does not substantially burden his core belief. Or a Jewish prisoner could be provided only non-kosher food because the real purpose of biblical dietary laws is health, so as long as the pork is well-cooked, etc., the prisoner’s religious beliefs are not substantially burdened. The Supreme Court has refused to examine the reasonableness of a sincere religious belief—in particular, the reasonableness of where the believer draws the line between sinful and acceptable—at least since Thomas v. Review Board of Indiana Employment Security Division, 450 U.S. 707, 715 (1981), and it emphatically reaffirmed that position in Burwell v. Hobby Lobby Stores, Inc., 134 S. Ct. 2751, 2778 (2014).

Worker protections:While on the Tenth Circuit, Gorsuch heard the case, TransAm Trucking Inc. v. Administrative Review Board.The majority determineda trucker had been wrongfully fired after he unhitched his trailer and drove away when the truck’s brakes froze. In his dissent, Gorsuch said pany had given the driverthe legal option to stay with his trailer and wait for help, which he declined, instead operating the truck in a way not permitted by pany.

Administrative law:Gorsuch was one of the judges on the Tenth Circuitwho wrote ina 2016 opinionthat the Chevron doctrine allowed “executive bureaucracies to swallow huge amounts of core judicial and legislative power and concentrate federal power in a way that seems more than a little difficult to square with the Constitution of the framers’ design.” Gorsuch called Chevron a “Goliath of modern administrative law,” and argued it may be time to face “the behemoth.” He suggested the judiciary rather than the executive branch should have the last word on the meaning of the law. However, in his Senate confirmation hearing he responded to Sen. Klobuchar’s claim about overturning Chevron by saying, “I would try e at it with as open a mind as a man could muster.” (For more on the Chevron doctrine, see this explainer.)

Comments
Welcome to mreligion comments! Please keep conversations courteous and on-topic. To fosterproductive and respectful conversations, you may see comments from our Community Managers.
Sign up to post
Sort by
Show More Comments
RELIGION & LIBERTY ONLINE
Anthony Bradley: ‘Black and Tired’ at The Heritage Foundation
Next Thursday, Acton Research Fellow Anthony B. Bradley will give a talk at The Heritage Foundation on his latest book, Black and Tired: Essays on Race, Politics, Culture and International Development. In his book, Dr. Bradley addresses local and global disparities in human flourishing that call for prudential judgments connecting good intentions and moral philosophy with sound economic principles. Marvin Olasky has said of the work, Dr. Thomas Sowell, black and eighty years old, displays no signs of tiredness in...
Philosopreneurs and ‘Creative’ Destruction of Higher Ed
Even philosophers can be entrepreneurial when economic es crashing in, creating an existential crisis. That’s one lesson from this intriguing Washington Post story (HT: Sarah Pulliam Bailey), “Philosophical counselors rely on eternal wisdom of great thinkers.” The actual value of philosophical counseling (or perhaps better yet, philosophical tutoring) might be debatable. But it does illustrate one response to the variegated crisis faced by higher education, particularly by those in the liberal arts and humanities. When you are done with school...
Religions’ reactions to financial realities
John Baden, chairman of the Foundation for Research on Economics & the Environment in Bozeman, Mont., wrote a column for the August 19 Bozeman Daily Chronicle about the Circle of Protection and Christians for a Sustainable Economy and how each has formulated a very different faith witness on the federal budget and debt debate. Baden says that the CASE letter to President Obama is “quite remarkable for it reads like one written by respected economists and policy analysts.” I attended...
Flash Mobbing King’s Dream
My contribution to this week’s Acton News & Commentary: Flash Mobbing King’s Dream by Anthony B. Bradley Every black person apprehended for robbing stores in a flash mob should have their court hearing not in front of a judge but facing the 30-foot statute of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. at his Washington memorial site. Each thief should be asked, “What do you think Dr. King would say to you right now?” I was not angry when I initially saw...
Richard Epstein takes on papal economics
Noted NYU law professor and free-market advocate Richard Epstein has written a provocative piece titled “How is Warren Buffett like the Pope? They are both dead wrong on economics.” Here’s the money quote: The great advantage petition in markets is that it exhausts all gains from trade, which thus allows individuals to attain higher levels of welfare. These win/win propositions may not reach the perfect endpoint, but they will avoid the woes that are now consuming once prosperous economies. Understanding...
VIDEO: ‘Doing the Right Thing’ with Chuck Colson
On September 24, thousands of people from all over the United States will tune in to a live webcast ofDoing the Right Thing, a discussion of the ethical crisis our country faces and what’s to be done about it. Doing the Right Thing is national project intended to spark an ethical reexamination by Americans. The initiative is led by Chuck Colson and group of Christian luminaries, including Acton’s director of programs, Michael Miller. Through a six-part DVD curriculum and live...
If Corporations Are Making Your Child Fat, Run Crying to Mommy
The New York Times ran an op-ed yesterday by Canadian legal scholar Joel Bakan, the author of a new book titled Childhood Under Siege: How Big Business Targets Children.Bakan argues that the 20th century has seen an increase in legal protections for two classes of persons, children and corporations, and that one of these is good and one is terribly, terribly bad—mean, even. That furthermore, there has been a kind of inexorable, Hegelian clash between the Corporation and the Child,...
The Folly of More Centralized Power
mentary this week addresses the importance of federalism and our fundamental founding principles in relation to the problems that plague the nation. There was once plenty mentary and finger pointing in regards to setting a new tone of political and civil discourse in the nation. However, the more the Washington power structure is threatened by those unsatisfied with where the leadership is taking us, the more those demanding a return to first principles will be splattered with, at times, revolting...
Gregg: Two Principles Candidates Must Hold Dear
Director of Research Samuel Gregg has a piece in Public Discourse today as part of a series on the 2012 presidential election. “Fix America’s Economy: Two Principles for Reform” explains why limited government is better government, and how the principle of subsidiarity can guide regulation that governments undertake. From the essay: The economist Arthur Brooks is exactly right when he notes that the end-game of America’s free enterprise culture is not the endless acquisition of wealth. The goal is human...
Progressive Boot Firmly Planted on Ranchers’ Throats
More than a billion dollars has already been pledged to relieve victims of the drought-turned-famine ravaging the Horn of Africa. The stricken countries—Somalia in particular—do not have the technology and the infrastructure to deal with a major drought, and so in what is ing a regular occurrence, the West is stepping in with aid. Meanwhile back at the ranch, Texas and Oklahoma are suffering record droughts that are wiping out crops and taxing cattle businesses. Ranchers cannot rely on the...
Related Classification
Copyright 2023-2026 - www.mreligion.com All Rights Reserved