President Donald Trump on January 31 announced that Neil Gorsuch is his nominee for the Supreme Court. He has been selected for the position of Associate Justice to replace the late Justice Scalia.
Gorsuch is a federal judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit in Denver, Colorado. He was appointed in 2006 to the 10th Circuit by then-President George W. Bush.
Gorsuch’s nomination was sent to the Senate on Feb. 1. If confirmed, he will replace Scalia who died last year. At 49, Gorsuch is the youngest Supreme Court nominees, and, if confirmed, he would be the youngest sitting Supreme Court justice since Clarence Thomas. Additionally, he would be the first Protestant on the court since John Paul Stevens’s retirement in 2010.
Gorsuch is a graduate of Columbia, Harvard, and Oxford. He served as the U.S. Department of Justice as the principal deputy associate attorney general in 2005. He assisted in managing major aspects of the agency’s work in areas such as constitutional law, counterterrorism, environmental regulation, and civil rights.
From 1995 to 2005, Gorsuch worked as an associate and partner at the law firm of Kellogg, Huber, Hansen, Todd, Evans & Figel, PLLC. He also clerked for Justice Byron White and Justice Kennedy of Supreme Court of the United States and Judge David Sentelle of the United States Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit.
Gorsuch attended Harvard Law School as a Harry Truman Scholar and graduated with honors in 1991. He graduated with honors from Columbia University in 1988, where he was elected to Phi Beta Kappa. After law school, he attended Oxford University as a Marshall Scholar and received his Doctorate in Philosophy in 2004.
“Judges should instead strive, if humanly and so imperfectly, 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,” Gorsuch said in his speech at Case Western Reserve University.
He also published a book titled The Future of Assisted Suicide and Euthanasia in 2006. He opposed assisted suicide, stating that “all human beings are intrinsically valuable and the intentional taking of human life by private persons is always wrong.”
In related news, Gorsuch criticized Trump’s tweet targeting federal district court judge James Robart. A spokesman of the Supreme Court nominee confirmed to The Guardian that Gorsuch called the president’s tweet “disheartening and demoralizing.” He criticized the president’s remark on the judiciary in a private meeting with Senator Richard Blumenthal, the spokesman said.
However, Trump said that reported comments from his Supreme Court nominee were misrepresented.