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 10, 2026 10:12 AM

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
Anti-religious hostility takes aim at foster care and adoption agencies
To most people, helping orphans and children in the foster system find stable homes seems like a top priority—the kind of priority that transcends politics and ideology,” says Kate Anderson in this week’s Acton Commentary. “Unfortunately, however, those vulnerable children are quickly losing their advocates—and their hope for a stable, loving family—because of rampant anti-religious bias in American society today.” In the United States,more than 400,000 childrenin the foster system are waiting for homes.Around 4%of children are adopted within a...
The Acton Institute’s transatlantic website publishes its first article in French
The Acton Institute’s Religion & Liberty Transatlantic website marked a milestone today: It released its first article in French. While the transatlantic website has diligently followed events in France and published an array of mentators since its launch in January 2017, until today all its articles had been published in English. This denied us access to the 275 million people worldwide who speak French. The Acton Institute takes seriously our mission to take our message of liberty, human dignity, and...
The Laymen’s Lounge: Everyday Theology for Everyday Life
I was happy to be interviewed recently for The Laymen’s Lounge, a new site focused on providing everyday theology to encourage and edify Christians in everyday life. My interview is titled, “Work and the Mundane,” and I get some plugs in for resources by figures including Lester DeKoster, Abraham Kuyper, Herman Bavinck, and Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Many of these thinkers are influential in my own life and work, and are represented as well in my collection of essays, Get Your Hands...
Why Simonetti is wrong to slander David French
We live in a strange age when good Christian men are slandered in defense of men of low character. Still, I would have never suspected to see such calumny on the Acton PowerBlog. Unfortunately, my new colleague Silvio Simonetti has used our site to assassinate the character of my friend—and Acton ally—David French. Simonetti says that French is “One of the most outspoken instigators of conspiratorial theories about the collusion between Vladimir Putin and Trump. . .” Perhaps if Simonetti...
The BBC scraps free TV for the elderly: A lesson from Boxer in ‘Animal Farm’
The BBC is renowned for its educational programming, but its most valuable lesson is being presented on a global stage right now. The BBC is facing backlash for doing away with a universal beneft for the elderly and, in the process, teaching an audience of millions how government programs really work. The BBC is severely restricting a benefit that pensioners e to rely on: free TV licenses. The main beneficiary of this decision is BBC executives. Artistic license The BBC...
A one-volume user’s manual for operating Western Civilization
Later this month, Gateway Editions will be releasing Reason, Faith, and the Struggle for Western Civilization, the new book by Acton research director Samuel Gregg. John Zmirak, senior editor at The Stream, has an early review of what he calls “a user’s guide to western civilization“: Read. This. Book. Even if you must do so by artificial light, or on Kindle, in a noisy coffee shop that won’t allow hunting dogs. Gregg’s book is the closest thing I’ve encountered in...
New French language article: « Bonne nouvelle, même les socialistes aiment le marché libre! »
The Acton Institute’s Religion & Liberty Transatlantic website has published its second article translated into French: « Bonne nouvelle, même les socialistes aiment le marché libre! » It is a translation of the article, “Great news: Even ‘socialists’ love the free market (poll),” which notes that the same Gallup poll showing socialism’s growing popularity also finds that the vast majority of Americans trust the free market, rather than the government, to regulate the economy. Translating this into French not only...
Sympathy as social virtue: Adam Smith’s solution for disruption
In our dynamic and disruptive economy, we see an increasing cultural anxiety about the automation and outmoding of all things, leading us to increase our focus on technical knowledge and “hard skills.” At the same time, we see increases in social isolation and declines in virtue munal life, causing many to wonder what might be missing. There’s hand-wringing and finger-pointing aplenty, with both progressives and (now) conservatives eager to blame “market capitalism.” The solution, we are told, lies in variations...
Why not to be a “polite” conservative in the age of French/Ahmari debate
The debate surrounding David French-ism started by New York Post’s Sohrab Ahmari in First Things is, in my view, less about content — or political proposals, to use another term — than about the future and, to a large extent, the recent past of the American Conservative movement. This debate is not about the benefits of the free market or whether a religiously-based moral philosophy should guide government, but about how mainstream “conservatism” lost its way and what the future...
Why you’ll love Acton University (even if you hate conferences)
I don’t like conferences. I don’t like seminars or conventions, either. I also don’t like colloquiums, symposiums, forums, or summits. I love people (really, I do) and I love discussions about ideas. But something happens when you put them together into a “conference” that causes my introverted tendencies to spike. I’m just not a conference-going kinda guy. That’s probably an odd admission to make, especially in a post in which I try to convince you e toActon University. But it...
Related Classification
Copyright 2023-2026 - www.mreligion.com All Rights Reserved