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Neil Gorsuch

Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States since 2017

Neil McGill Gorsuch (August 29, 1967) is an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States. Gorsuch is a proponent of textualism in statutory interpretation, originalism in interpreting the U.S. Constitution, and is an advocate of natural law philosophy.

Courage remains as important in the legal profession today as it was then. Throughout our history lawyers who have made the greatest mark on this country haven't done so because they were smarter or were born into better families or held more important positions; it was because they were willing to stand firm for justice in the face of immense pressure and often at grave personal costs.
About half of the fifty-six colonists who signed the Declaration were lawyers. They quite literally put their lives on the line to secure a representative government and one of just laws: By signing the declaration, they became marked men who faced certain death if their cause failed.
This overweening addiction to the courtroom as the place to debate social policy is bad for the country and bad for the judiciary. In the legislative arena, especially when the country is closely divided, compromises tend to be the rule the day. But when judges rule this or that policy unconstitutional, there’s little room for compromise: One side must win, the other must lose.
To kick a dog intentionally- to choose to hurt the animal- says something about the kicker, his or her way of interacting with animals and, perhaps, human beings- in short, it tells us at least something about the kicker's character and beliefs, about who the kicker is. By contrast, as Holmes seemed to recognize, watching a person trip over the dog tells us far less about who that person is or about the person's character or beliefs.
[As] a judge looking back, the most you can hope for is you have done fairness to each person who has come before you, decided each case on the facts and the law, and that you have just carried on the tradition of a neutral, impartial judiciary. That is what we do. We just resolve cases and controversies. Lawyers are supposed to be fierce advocates, and I was once a fierce advocate for my clients. But a judge is supposed to listen courteously and rule impartially.
I would like to be remembered as a good dad, a good husband, kind and mild in private life, dignified and firm in public life. I have no illusions that I will be remembered for very long. If Byron White is nearly forgotten, as he is now and said he would be, I have no illusions that I will last five minutes. That is as it should be.
Our Constitution reserves for the tribes a place — an enduring place — in the structure of American life.
When the express terms of a statute give us one answer and extratextual considerations suggest another, it’s no contest. Only the written word is the law, and all persons are entitled to its benefit.

Quotes

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2000s

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2005

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  • This overweening addiction to the courtroom as the place to debate social policy is bad for the country and bad for the judiciary. In the legislative arena, especially when the country is closely divided, compromises tend to be the rule the day. But when judges rule this or that policy unconstitutional, there’s little room for compromise: One side must win, the other must lose. In constitutional litigation, too, experiments and pilot programs — real-world laboratories in which ideas can be assessed on the results they produce — are not possible. Ideas are tested only in the abstract world of legal briefs and lawyers arguments. As a society, we lose the benefit of the give-and-take of the political process and the flexibility of social experimentation that only the elected branches can provide.

The Future of Assisted Suicide and Euthanasia (2006)

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Princeton: Princeton University Press. All quotes are from the 2006 hardcover edition.
  • In fact, the insight of the double effect doctrine is not remotely theologic. As Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, himself a frequent utilitarian critic of relying on intent, observed, "even a dog distinguishes between being stumbled over and being kicked." Of course, the question remains why should we, as a secular matter, care more about consequences that are intended versus those that are not? What wisdom, if any, lies behind this distinction? Justice Holmes' homespun illustration suggests the beginnings of an explanation. To kick a dog intentionally- to choose to hurt the animal- says something about the kicker, his or her way of interacting with animals and, perhaps, human beings- in short, it tells us at least something about the kicker's character and beliefs, about who the kicker is. By contrast, as Holmes seemed to recognize, watching a person trip over the dog tells us far less about who that person is or about the person's character or beliefs.
    • p. 55
  • The self-defining nature of intended actions can be illustrated by the case, developed earlier in this chapter, of the drivers who hit the child in the street. In one instance, we considered the driver who comes upon a child darting into the street. The driver hits and kills the child by accident. In doing so, the driver indubitably effects an awful result- the consequences he brings about are terrible and, as a result, we may censure and punish the driver. But we may very well treat him differently from another driver who intentionally hunts down the child with her car. For this latter driver, we may say that no punishment is harsh enough. What undergirds the difference in our reaction to the two drivers? It is the difference in their self-definition, volition, choice. The hunting driver expresses herself to the world through her actions, defines who she is and what she believes, in a very different way than the accidental driver. Thus, what really illuminates the darting child hypothetical and ones like it are not arguments over causation but an assessment of human intentions.
    • p. 55-56
  • The morally defining nature of intentions can be further illustrated by any number of choices we make in daily living. Most of us might be said, for example, to "allow" the poor in our cities and towns to go hungry because we fail to do enough to help them- spending our time and our money in other pursuits, such as family and friends. We may even fully forsee or know that our failure to do more for the poor will mean that some persons will go hungry. While our choices in such cases indubitably say something about who we are, they do not say the same thing about us as would plotting intentionally to starve others. To seek out to starve another person is to endorse that objective, intelligently choose it, and freely will it. By contrast, the occurrence or nonoccurrence of unintended side effects, even ones we foresee as absolutely inevitable (as with the hungry person left unfed), necessarily say less about our success or failure in effecting our free will and intelligence in the free world.
    imply put, we live as human beings in a world where we must make choices and take actions that, even when entirely legitimate and good, necessarily harm or damage or impinge upon other goods. And this happens at both the individual and the societal level. In choosing to spend a weekend with family, it may unavoidably mean that some persons in the soup kitchen will go hungry. In choosing to spend additional money on a prescription drug care program that primarily benefits the elderly, we as a society may know with crystalline clarity that we will not be able to increase spending on education for the young. With so many varied and diverse goods to pursue in this life, we cannot help but make choices in pursuit of legitimate and upright aims that also entail inevitable, if unwanted, negative consequences for other instances of human goods.
    • p. 56
  • In contrast to unintended consequences, intended acts are always within our control, subjects of our free will and choice. Because we can always choose to refrain from doing intentional harm to others- because our purposeful actions are within our control- our intentional choices necessarily reveal more about our character and individuality than any unintended side effect ever can. To disregard whether or not an act is intended would be, thus, in a very real way to disregard the role of free will in the world- leaving, for example, those who fail to assist charities that feed the hungry open to censure and penalties as those who would starve such persons.
    Precisely to avoid such acts of injustice in implicit recognition of commonsense (nontheologic) moral power of the double effect insight, secular American criminal law has long calibrated different levels of responsibility and punishment based on different levels of mens rea. The purposeful killer is considered for lethal injection while the individual who kills in self-defense, foreseeing death as a consequence but intending only to stop the aggression, may receive no punishment at all. The driver who speeds with reckless disregard for the consequences to others but without any intent to harm the darting child may receive jail time but is often treated far differently from the depraved killer who sets out witha purposeful plan to murder the child. The one who disregards the hungry and homeless may not command respect and admiration, but he or she is not subjected to the same penalties as one who deliberately harms such persons.
    • p. 56-57
  • Much public debate over assisted suicide and euthanasia both in the U.S. and abroad has rested on the implicit premise that requests for assistance in dying are closely linked to pain. But a great many facts have now amassed running counter to this supposition- the Dutch euthanasia regime has moved away from any requirement of physical or psychological suffering; Oregon has never required a showing of pain of any kind; clinical studies continue to suggest that modern palliative techniques, if disseminated and practiced by knowledgeable doctors, are able to address pain in most, if not all, circumstances; Oregon's annual reports and repeated Dutch surveys suggest that pain simply is not a leading reason motivating patient demands for euthanasia or assisted suicide; there has now long persisted a suggestive correlation between divorce and requests for assisted suicide. And now comes the Journal of Clinical Oncology study suggesting that the major motivation behind assisted suicide and euthanasia is not a poor prognosis but depression.
    • p. 225
  • Of course, the movement for legalizing assisted suicide and euthanasia is at least in part the result of a culture increasingly influenced by strict neutralist concepts of autonomy, itself perhaps the byproduct of the baby boomer generation heading into old age... But when it comes not to defending an abstract "right to die" but to making the very concrete and personal decision whether to die, it seems that something more basic may be in play. We have known since Jefferson's time that old-fashioned suicide is often motivated by mental ailments, depression foremost among these. Yet contemporary assisted suicide and euthanasia advocates have long denied that depression plays any meaningful role in assisted suicide and euthanasia requests. The findings in the Journal of Clinical Oncology now point to a contrary conclusion, suggesting that the desire to seek out any early death at the hands of a doctor is itself not so much the result of a dispassionate and cool response to a poor prognosis as it is the product of diagnosable and treatable depression.
    • p. 225

2010s

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2014

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  • Of course, trying to separate the sacred from the secular can be a tricky business—perhaps especially for a civil court whose warrant does not extend to matters divine.
    • United States Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit case no. 12–8048 Yellowbear v. Lampert (January 23, 2014). As quoted in: "Justice Neil Gorsuch Is a Committed Defender of Tribal Rights" by the New York Times Adam Liptak on June 15, 2023. Archived from the original on June 29, 2023.

2016

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  • It seems well past time to reconsider our sweeping UPL [Unauthorized Practice of Law] prohibitions. The fact is nonlawyers already perform — and have long performed — many kinds of work traditionally and simultaneously performed by lawyers. Nonlawyers prepare tax returns and give tax advice. They regularly negotiate with and argue cases before the Internal Revenue Service. They prepare patent applications and otherwise advocate on behalf of inventors before the Patent & Trademark Office. And it is entirely unclear why exceptions should exist to help these sort of niche (and some might say, financially capable) populations but not be expanded in ways more consciously aimed at serving larger numbers of lower- and middle-class clients. . . . Consistent with the law of supply and demand, increasing the supply of legal services can be expected to lower prices, drive efficiency, and improve consumer satisfaction.

2017

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  • I immediately lost what breath I had left. And I am not embarrassed to admit that I couldn’t see the rest of the way down the mountain for the tears.

A Republic, If You Can Keep It (2019)

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New York: Crown Forum. All quotes are from the 2019 hardcover first edition.
  • Courage has been essential to the rule of law in this country from the beginning. The Declaration of Independence itself was, at heart, a complaint that the king had denied colonists the rule of law. As justification for their rebellion, colonists cited the fact that the king had withheld assent to duly enacted legislation, refused trial by jury, and prevented colonists from playing a significant role in their own governance. About half of the fifty-six colonists who signed the Declaration were lawyers. They quite literally put their lives on the line to secure a representative government and one of just laws: By signing the declaration, they became marked men who faced certain death if their cause failed.
    • Speech to students at Drake University Law School in Des Moines, Iowa on 16 August 2018, p. 181-182
  • Courage remains as important in the legal profession today as it was then. Throughout our history lawyers who have made the greatest mark on this country haven't done so because they were smarter or were born into better families or held more important positions; it was because they were willing to stand firm for justice in the face of immense pressure and often at grave personal costs.
    • Speech to students at Drake University Law School in Des Moines, Iowa on 16 August 2018, p. 182
  • What do I mean by courage? Well, let's start with what I don't mean. I don't mean blind bullheadedness or rudeness or incivility. We have all too much of those things in our culture and in our profession. They are pretenders of courage, not the real thing. For true courage will often require you to admit a mistake, hold your tongue, or wait to fight another day. When it requires you to stand up against the powers arrayed around you, it will also require you to do so with not just respect but affection for your fellow citizen. What I mean by courage is what Atticus Finch meant by it in To Kill a Mockingbird. You may remember that Finch defended an African-American man wrongly accused of raping a white woman in Alabama during the Great Depression- and that in taking on the representation he faced criticism and threats from his friends and community. As he told his daughter in the book: "I wanted you to see what real courage is, instead of getting the idea that courage is a man with a gun in his hand. It's when you know you're licked before you begin but you begin anyway and see it through no matter what."
    • Speech to students at Drake University Law School in Des Moines, Iowa on 16 August 2018, p. 182-183
  • Whether you serve ultimately as a lawyer or judge, I hope as an officer of the court all the same you will help explain these virtues to your clients, your family, and your friends. In popular culture, we often see people deriding judges who issue unpopular rulings or lawyers who represent unpopular clients. We see those who confuse a judge's ruling or a lawyer's representation with support for the person's cause or personal favoritism or bias. They suggest that when a judge rules for a corporation, he loves corporations. Or that when a lawyer represents a criminal defendant, he loves criminals.
    Attacks like these miss the mark. They misunderstand completely the role of judge and lawyer. I hope you will help remind those you encounter that if they want to secure their own liberty from oppression, they should want lawyers and judges who are unafraid to follow the law where it leads and enforce the law fearlessly, without bending to the passing whims and wishes of public opinion. For one day, too, you might remind your friends, they could find themselves braced against the prevailing winds of the day, in need of a lawyer and facing a judge. And when that day comes, I hope you will ask them, would they rather stand before a court of public opinion or a court of law?
    • Speech to students at Drake University Law School in Des Moines, Iowa on 16 August 2018, p. 190
  • I ask my kids every semester when I teach ethics. I finish the semester by asking them to spend five minutes writing their obituary. They hate it. They think it is corny, and it might be a little corny. And then I ask them if they will volunteer to read some of them, and when they do, it always becomes clear people want to be remembered for the kindnesses they showed other people. And what I point out to them- what I try to point out- is that it is not how big your bank account balance is. Nobody ever puts that in their draft obituary, or that they billed the most hours, or that they won the most cases. It is how you treated other people along the way that matters. And for me, it is the words I read yesterday from Increase Sumner's tombstone [see page 321]. And that means as a person I would like to be remembered as a good dad, a good husband, kind and mild in private life, dignified and firm in public life. I have no illusions that I will be remembered for very long. If Byron White is nearly forgotten, as he is now and said he would be, I have no illusions that I will last five minutes. That is as it should be.
    • During Gorsuch's confirmation hearing for his nomination for Associate Justice of the United States Supreme Court in March 2017, p. 322-323
  • But as a judge looking back, the most you can hope for is you have done fairness to each person who has come before you, decided each case on the facts and the law, and that you have just carried on the tradition of a neutral, impartial judiciary. That is what we do. We just resolve cases and controversies. Lawyers are supposed to be fierce advocates, and I was once a fierce advocate for my clients. But a judge is supposed to listen courteously and rule impartially.
    • During Gorsuch's confirmation hearing for his nomination for Associate Justice of the United States Supreme Court in March 2017, p. 323

2020s

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  • Sometimes small gestures can have unexpected consequences. Major initiatives practically guarantee them. In our time, few pieces of federal legislation rank in significance with the Civil Rights Act of 1964. There, in Title VII, Congress outlawed discrimination in the workplace on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, or national origin. Today, we must decide whether an employer can fire someone simply for being homosexual or transgender. The answer is clear. An employer who fires an individual for being homosexual or transgender fires that person for traits or actions it would not have questioned in members of a different sex. Sex plays a necessary and undisguisable role in the decision, exactly what Title VII forbids. Those who adopted the Civil Rights Act might not have anticipated their work would lead to this particular result. Likely, they weren’t thinking about many of the Act’s consequences that have become apparent over the years, including its prohibition against discrimination on the basis of motherhood or its ban on the sexual harassment of male employees. But the limits of the drafters’ imagination supply no reason to ignore the law’s demands. When the express terms of a statute give us one answer and extratextual considerations suggest another, it’s no contest. Only the written word is the law, and all persons are entitled to its benefit.
  • This Court normally interprets a statute in accord with the ordinary public meaning of its terms at the time of its enactment. After all, only the words on the page constitute the law adopted by Congress and approved by the President. If judges could add to, remodel, update, or detract from old statutory terms inspired only by extratextual sources and our own imaginations, we would risk amending statutes outside the legislative process reserved for the people’s representatives. And we would deny the people the right to continue relying on the original meaning of the law they have counted on to settle their rights and obligations.
  • The consequences of the law’s focus on individuals rather than groups are anything but academic. Suppose an employer fires a woman for refusing his sexual advances. It’s no defense for the employer to note that, while he treated that individual woman worse than he would have treated a man, he gives preferential treatment to female employees overall. The employer is liable for treating this woman worse in part because of her sex. Nor is it a defense for an employer to say it discriminates against both men and women because of sex. This statute works to protect individuals of both sexes from discrimination, and does so equally. So an employer who fires a woman, Hannah, because she is insufficiently feminine and also fires a man, Bob, for being insufficiently masculine may treat men and women as groups more or less equally. But in both cases the employer fires an individual in part because of sex. Instead of avoiding Title VII exposure, this employer doubles it.
  • From the ordinary public meaning of the statute’s language at the time of the law’s adoption, a straightforward rule emerges: An employer violates Title VII when it intentionally fires an individual employee based in part on sex. It doesn’t matter if other factors besides the plaintiff ’s sex contributed to the decision. And it doesn’t matter if the employer treated women as a group the same when compared to men as a group. If the employer intentionally relies in part on an individual employee’s sex when deciding to discharge the employee—put differently, if changing the employee’s sex would have yielded a different choice by the employer—a statutory violation has occurred. Title VII’s message is “simple but momentous”: An individual employee’s sex is “not relevant to the selection, evaluation, or compensation of employees.” (Price Waterhouse v. Hopkins, 490 U. S. 228, 239 (1989) (plurality opinion)). The statute’s message for our cases is equally simple and momentous: An individual’s homosexuality or transgender status is not relevant to employment decisions. That’s because it is impossible to discriminate against a person for being homosexual or transgender without discriminating against that individual based on sex.
  • On the far end of the Trail of Tears was a promise. Forced to leave their ancestral lands in Georgia and Alabama, the Creek Nation received assurances that their new lands in the West would be secure forever.
    • McGirt v. Oklahoma, 591 U.S. ___ (2020), Opinion of the Court (July 9, 2020). As quoted in: "Justice Neil Gorsuch Is a Committed Defender of Tribal Rights" by the New York Times Adam Liptak on June 15, 2023. Archived from the original on June 29, 2023.
  • Where this court once stood firm, today it wilts.
  • Often, Native American tribes have come to this court seeking justice only to leave with bowed heads and empty hands. But that is not because this court has no justice to offer them. Our Constitution reserves for the tribes a place — an enduring place — in the structure of American life.
    • Haaland v. Brackeen, Concurring opinion (June 15, 2023). As quoted in: "Justice Neil Gorsuch Is a Committed Defender of Tribal Rights" by the New York Times Adam Liptak on June 15, 2023. Archived from the original on June 29, 2023.

Over Ruled (2024)

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Over Ruled: The Human Cost of Too Much Law. New York: HarperCollins Publishers. Co-written with Janie Nitze. All quotes are from the 2024 hardcover first edition.
  • Over the years, I have asked myself what I can do about the problem of too much law. Ultimately, I always circle back to the same answer: not much. As a judge, my job is to apply the law. I cannot change the underlying impulses that have led us to a society to regulate ever more, criminalize ever more, and punish ever more. The best I can do is share with you what I have seen from my unusual vantage in our legal system. Judges are not supposed to live "isolated from... society" but are encouraged to engage in a "wide range" of life's activities and "contribute to the law, the legal system, and the administration of justice." Many of my colleagues and predecessors have done just that, offering thoughtful books on an array of topics. It is in that same spirit that I offer this book.
    But if any real and lasting change is possible, it will not come from judges like me. It will come from people whose stories are recounted here. As Havel witnessed during the fall of communism, many of the deepest changes in his own society came from "unknown... people who wanted no more than to be able to live within the truth, to play the music they enjoyed, to sing the songs that were relevant to their lives, and to live freely in dignity and partnership... They had been given every opportunity to adapt to the status quo... Yet they decided on a different course."
    • p. 6-7
  • Judicial decisions, as well, contain vital information about how all our laws and rules operate. Today, most of these decisions can be found on searchable electronic databases, but some come with high subscription fees. If you can't afford those, you may have to consult a library. Good luck finding what you need there: reported federal decisions now fill 5,000 volumes Each volume clocks in at about 1,000 pages, for a total of more than 5 million pages. Back in 1997, Thomas Baker, a law professor, found taht "the cumulative output of all the lower federal courts... amounts to a small, but respectable library that, when stacked end-to-end, runs for one-and-one-half football fields." One can only wonder how many football fields we're up to now.
    • p. 18
  • If you were to sit down to read through all of our criminal laws and regulations- or at least flip through them- you would find plenty of surprises, too. You would learn, for example, that it's a federal crime to "injure[]" a government-owned lamp in Washington, D.C., consult with a known pirate, or advertise wine by suggesting its intoxicating qualities. The truth is, we now have so many federal criminal laws covering so many things that one scholar suggests that "there is no one in the United States over the age of 18 who cnanot be indicted for some federal crime." In case you think that's an exaggeration, he adds: "That is not an exaggeration."
    It's a state of affairs that sometimes makes it hard not to wonder how far we have left to travel to a world described by Lavrentiy Beria, the chief of Joseph Stalin's secret police, who was reputed to have bragged, "Show me the man and I'll show you the crime." Don't think it can happen here? Ask John Yates, who was convicted for an offense he'd probably never heard of, one that few would have imagined would apply to him, and one that robbed him and his family of the life they cherished.
    • p. 22-23
  • Numbers tell part of the story, but only a part. Today, the law touches our lives in very different ways than it once did. In the past, the rules that governed what happened in our homes, families, houses of worship, and schools were found less in law than in custom or were left to private agreement and individual judgement. Even in the areas of life where law has long played a larger role, its character has changed. Once, most of our law came from local and state authorities; now, federal law often dominates.
    • p. 23
  • In truth, the push and pull between national and local authorities that federalism allows has nothing to do with benefiting one party or another; it has more to do with the fact that no single government can always get it right. Protecting federalism means ensuring that when one government loses its way, another can help light the way back.
    • p. 54
  • Despite my real concerns, though, I confess I remain an incorrigible optimist. America has overcome daunting odds time and again. At our nation's birth, almost no serious thinker in Europe thought a democracy could survive long without devolving into chaos or tyranny Yet almost 250 years later, here we stand. For much of our history, the promise of equal treatment under the law looked more like an unserious fiction than an earnest ambition. Yet while much remains to be done, we have made many strides to realize that promise, fro the Civil War to the Civil Rights Act of 1964. World wars, terrorist attacks, political assassinations, economic depressions, the fall of other countries to communism and fascism, and so much more have tested our nation, too. Still, America remains the greatest beacon of liberty the world has ever known. The ideals embodied in our Declaration of Independence- that each of us enjoys certain inalienable rights, that all of us are created equal, that governments derive their just power from the consent of the governed- have inspired billions of people around the world and captured truths that resonate in every human heart. I would never bet against the American people.
    • p. 216

Quotes about Gorsuch

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The tall, square-jawed Gorsuch, distinguished by a full head of gray hair and Ivy League credentials, was perfect for a new president drawn to central casting choices. ~ Joan Biskupic
 
I know Neil Gorsuch well and have known him seemingly forever. He is a good friend. He is kind, funny, hard-working and brilliant. He’s a great writer and independent. ~ Brett Kavanaugh
 
Gorsuch’s casual way with inconvenient facts, and vague statements of the law, suggests that we can’t be confident of what just happened [in 303 Creative v. Elenis]. The Court, however, is supposed to tell us what the law is, not just hand opaquely reasoned victories to every conservative Christian who walks in the door. ~ Andrew Koppelman
  • The tall, square-jawed Gorsuch, distinguished by a full head of gray hair and Ivy League credentials, was perfect for a new president drawn to central casting choices.
    • Joan Biskupic, Nine Black Robes: Inside the Supreme Court's Drive to the Right and its Historic Consequences (2023), New York: William Morrow, first edition hardcover, p. 24
  • Earlier Supreme Court candidates, including John Roberts, had been vetted by the Federalist Society, but Gorsuch, who entered law school only after the society had penetrated campuses, was the first GOP appointee to have been steeped fully in its culture. By the mid-1990s, the organization had developed an entrenched network, playing a major role in judicial selection and helping to screen candidates for top GOP administration slots. After serving as a law clerk to Justice Byron R. White, a fellow Coloradan, and simultaneously for Justice Anthony Kennedy, Gorsuch worked as a top aide in the Justice Department during the Bush administration, for fourteen months, before his Tenth Circuit appointment in 2006. Over his nearly eleven years on the appellate court, Gorsuch espoused the "originalist" approach, reading the Constitution in terms of its eighteenth-century understanding, a practice widely associated with Scalia and tracing years earlier to Robert Bork, a Yale law professor and U.S. appellate court judge whose own 1987 Supreme Court nomination was defeated in a historic Senate battle. Gorsuch had gone fly-fishing with Scalia in 2014 on the Colorado River and had kept an inscribed photograph from the outing.
    Gorsuch's nomination appeared to reinforce Trump's vow to appoint justices who would reverse Roe v. Wade, as Gorsuch's record suggested opposition to abortion rights. In his book The Future of Assisted Suicide and Euthanasia, published in 2006 by Princeton University Press, Gorsuch argued against such practices and emphasized the "inviolability" of human life.
    • Joan Biskupic, Nine Black Robes: Inside the Supreme Court's Drive to the Right and its Historic Consequences (2023), New York: William Morrow, first edition hardcover, p. 26-27
  • A separate Gorsuch decision from the Tenth Circuit drew the harshest scrutiny and lived on, even in Gorsuch's retelling. A truck driver whose trailer broke down in subzero temperatures had unhitched the rig and temporarily left it behind as he became numb in the cold. His employer fired him for leaving the trailer. The Tenth Circuit majority found that the driver should have been protected by federal worker-safety law. Judge Gorsuch dissented, emphasizing that the employer had told the driver to wait for help and finding that his claim fell outside the worker-safety law's plain meaning. Minnesota Democratic senator Al Franken mocked the result as "absurd" and pressed Gorsuch about what he would have done under the circumstances. "Senator, I don't know, I wasn't in the man's shoes," Gorsuch said.
    • Joan Biskupic, Nine Black Robes: Inside the Supreme Court's Drive to the Right and its Historic Consequences (2023), New York: William Morrow, first edition hardcover, p. 34
  • The Supreme Court just announced a new, vague category of businesses that have a constitutional right to discriminate against anyone for any reason they like. I’d like to explain to you what the law is now. I can’t do that, because it can’t be done.
    303 Creative v. Elenis concerned Lorie Smith, who owns a graphic design firm. She wants to expand her business to include custom-designed wedding websites, but she opposes same-sex marriage on religious grounds. So she won’t design sites for same-sex weddings and wants to say that on her own promotional website. But the Colorado Anti-Discrimination Act (CADA) bans businesses that are open to the public from discriminating against gay people or announcing their intent to do so. She sued the state, seeking a preemptive ruling that this law couldn’t be applied against her.
    Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch, writing for the majority, agreed: First Amendment free speech means that law may not “compel an individual to create speech she does not believe.”
    He relied on a 1943 case holding that schoolchildren could not be compelled to say the Pledge of Allegiance, in which the court said that “no official, high or petty, can prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion, or other matters of opinion.”
    The analogy is strained. The children could not possibly avoid the compulsion to say the pledge, but no one is required by law to operate a business that is open to the public. Now, however, some of those businesses can discriminate against potential customers or clients. Which ones? It depends on how expressive they are. How can courts decide that? Where is the line?
  • Faced with what he called a “sea of hypotheticals about photographers, sta­tioners, and others,” Gorsuch conceded that “determining what qualifies as expressive activity protected by the First Amendment can sometimes raise difficult ques­tions.”
    But, he wrote, no one disputes — indeed, the parties stipulated — that “Ms. Smith seeks to engage in expressive activity.” But everything humans do expresses something. In an earlier case, Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado, Gorsuch joined an opinion by Justice Clarence Thomas saying that food preparation (selling a wedding cake) was sufficiently expressive that the seller had a right to discriminate.
    Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote in her dissent that “A website designer could equally refuse to create a wedding website for an interracial couple. … A stationer could refuse to sell a birth announcement for a disabled couple because she opposes their having a child. A large retail store could reserve its family portrait services for ‘traditional’ families. And so on.”
    Gorsuch doesn’t respond. It will take years of litigation to find out what “expressive” means. The fact that the parties stipulated that one business is expressive does not entail that “expressiveness” is a workable test for courts. What if the parties had stipulated that some websites are blessed by angels?
  • Gorsuch’s decision also repeatedly cites a strange, silly statement in the poorly reasoned decision of the Tenth Circuit, which Smith was appealing from. That court, after acknowledging that there is a risk of excising some ideas from the public dialogue, said that “Eliminating such ideas is CADA’s very purpose.” Gorsuch calls this a “finding,” even though courts of appeals are not permitted to find facts (that is the trial court’s job) and this one wasn’t found by the trial court or stipulated by the parties.
    He then accuses Sotomayor’s dissent of “approving a government’s effort” to accomplish that purpose. A law is invalid if it seeks to accomplish an impermissible end. His claim implies that all antidiscrimination laws are unconstitutional in all their applications. He doesn’t mean that, of course. More mystery.
  • Gorsuch has developed a habit of misattributing purposes to statutes and then complaining that the purposes either were bad ones or were being pursued in a discriminatory way. His own concurrence in Masterpiece presented a convoluted misinterpretation of Colorado’s simple requirement that one treat all customers alike, in order to claim that people whom the law didn’t even mention were thereby treated unfairly.
    Now he claims that “Colorado seeks to force an individual to speak in ways that align with its views but defy her conscience about a matter of major significance.” This is just false. Colorado wasn’t trying to force anyone to do anything. Smith sued the state, aggrieved by what she thought it might do sometime in the future.
    On the one hand, the decision might be interpreted narrowly, to apply only to businesses that take specific commissions for unique artwork. On the other hand, the free speech theories floated in Masterpiece, to which Gorsuch was sympathetic, were so broad that they would protect absolutely any discrimination, or for that matter any other conduct, that a court wanted to protect.
    Gorsuch’s casual way with inconvenient facts, and vague statements of the law, suggests that we can’t be confident of what just happened. The court, however, is supposed to tell us what the law is, not just hand opaquely reasoned victories to every conservative Christian who walks in the door.

See also

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