Justice Neil Gorsuch
Associate Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court
Neil McGill Gorsuch was born in August 1967 in Denver, Colorado. He earned an undergraduate degree in political science from Columbia University and received his Juris Doctor from Harvard Law School. He was awarded a Doctor of Philosophy in Law from the University of Oxford, where he completed research on assisted suicide and euthanasia. He was a judicial clerk at the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit and then for Supreme Court Justices Byron White and Anthony Kennedy. He entered the private practice of law.
He served briefly as Principal Deputy to the Associate Attorney General at the U.S. Department of Justice. He managed the Department’s Civil Division. President George W. Bush nominated Gorsuch to a seat on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit. He was confirmed by a unanimous voice vote in the Senate and assumed his position in July 2006.
After the death of Justice Antonin Scalia, President Donald Trump announced the nomination of Gorsuch to the United States Supreme Court. Hearings on his confirmation were tension-filled, and he was forwarded to the floor of the Senate a party-line vote of the Judiciary Committee. His nomination was debated on the floor of the Senate, and, in early April, he was confirmed. He received his commission on April 8, 2017.
Gorsuch is married to Marie Louise, a British citizen he met at Oxford. They have two daughters. Raised Catholic, he is a member of a mainline Protestant denomination.
In the News…
Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch recently wrote that Americans’ civil liberties were massively intruded upon by the government when it exercised emergency powers during the COVID-19 pandemic.
“Since March 2020, we may have experienced the greatest intrusions on civil liberties in the peacetime history of this country. Executive officials across the country issued emergency decrees on a breathtaking scale,” he stated.
His statement was attached to a case involving Title 42 which the Supreme Court dismissed as moot. He said laws on executive authority used during COVID were possibly unjustifiably a pretext. Of those laws, he wrote, “It’s hard not to wonder whether, after nearly a half-century and in light of our Nation’s recent experience, another look is warranted.”
“It is hard not to wonder, too, whether state legislatures might profitably reexamine the proper scope of emergency executive powers at the state level,” he continued. “At the very least, one can hope that the Judiciary will not soon again allow itself to be part of the problem by permitting litigants to manipulate our docket to perpetuate a decree designed for one emergency to address another.”
Contact this Leader…
Did you pray for Justice Gorsuch today? You can let him know at:
The Honorable Justice Neil Gorsuch
Supreme Court of the United States
1 First Street NE
Washington, DC 20543
