A New Generation On the Court

By a vote of 54-45, the Senate today concluded the long, bruising battle to confirm President Donald Trump’s nomination of Judge Neil Gorsuch to the U.S. Supreme Court. Chief Justice John Roberts is scheduled to swear Judge Gorsuch in at 9:00 a.m. on Monday morning. We can now look forward to the Court’s return to its normal practices, taking and deciding cases without the prospect of 4-4 decisions hanging over it.

Judge Gorsuch has often been likened to Justice Antonin Scalia, whose seat he will assume, and for good reason, for he too is a textualist and an originalist in his approach to constitutional and statutory interpretation. But he comes from a later generation, one immersed in the debates between liberals, conservatives, and classical liberals over the proper interpretation of the Constitution and the role of judges under it. During his confirmation hearings, for example, Judge Gorsuch spoke favorably of the Court’s decisions in cases like Meyer v. Nebraska and Pierce v. Society of Sisters, where the Court upheld parental rights not expressly found in the Constitution. That bodes well for his appreciation for the rich moral, political, and legal theory that stands behind and informs the often broad language of the Constitution, as his own graduate study at Oxford in natural law would suggest.

Speaking of generational change, an interesting historical note was just brought to my attention by a personal friend with whom I served in the Reagan administration, Chicago attorney Joseph A. Morris. As a law clerk for Justice Anthony Kennedy, Justice Gorsuch will be the first U.S. Supreme Court justice ever to serve on the bench alongside the justice for whom he clerked. The play between them will be fun to watch! Congratulations Judge, soon to be Justice, Neil Gorsuch.