Neil Gorsuch

Neil Gorsuch joined the Supreme Court in April 2017, filling the seat left vacant by the death of Justice Antonin Scalia. He was born on August 29, 1967, in Denver, Colorado. His mother, Anne Gorsuch Burford, served as administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency under President Ronald Reagan, and he spent part of his youth in the Washington, D.C., area. He graduated from Columbia University in 1988 and Harvard Law School in 1991, and later earned a doctorate in legal philosophy at Oxford, where he had first studied as a Marshall Scholar. He clerked for Justices Byron White and Anthony Kennedy, and he became the first justice to serve alongside a justice for whom he had clerked.

Gorsuch practiced law at a Washington firm for about a decade and in 2005 and 2006 served as a senior official in the Justice Department. President George W. Bush appointed him to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit, based in Denver, in 2006. When Scalia died in February 2016, the Republican-controlled Senate declined to hold hearings on President Barack Obama's nominee, Merrick Garland, leaving the seat open through the presidential election. President Donald Trump nominated Gorsuch in January 2017. After Democrats mounted a filibuster, the Senate changed its rules to end filibusters on Supreme Court nominations, and it confirmed him 54 to 45 on April 7, 2017. He was 49 when he took his seat three days later.

Gorsuch describes himself as an originalist and textualist, and he often writes in defense of individual liberty against government power. He wrote the majority opinion in Bostock v. Clayton County (2020), holding that the Civil Rights Act of 1964 protects gay and transgender employees from workplace discrimination, and in McGirt v. Oklahoma (2020), holding that much of eastern Oklahoma remains a Creek reservation for purposes of federal criminal law. He also wrote Kennedy v. Bremerton School District (2022), which sided with a public high school football coach who prayed on the field after games, and 303 Creative v. Elenis (2023), which held that a web designer could not be compelled to create wedding websites that conflicted with her beliefs.