Two profiles of Justice Gorsuch in popular commentary highlight his originalism. At Bloomberg: Gorsuch Charts Course as Originalist With Independent Streak.
Justice Neil Gorsuch has delivered almost precisely what conservatives were hoping for over his two years on the U.S. Supreme Court, even though his principles occasionally take him in other directions.
He’s followed the originalist mold of the late Justice Antonin Scalia, even joining the court’s liberals at times on criminal procedure matters as Scalia often did. He’s made Clarence Thomas less of an iconoclast in arguments to overturn longstanding precedents.
But he’s also made his individual marks with bold wording on capital punishment and Native American rights, including his opinion this month that the Eighth Amendment’s protection against cruel and unusual punishment doesn’t “guarantee a prisoner a painless death.”
“Gorsuch has been a grand slam for President Trump, who campaigned on a promise to appoint originalist and textualist justices in the mold of Scalia,” Mike Davis, who clerked for Gorsuch at the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit and at the high court, told Bloomberg Law. …
In the Washington Times: The New Scalia: Neil Gorsuch befriends liberal justices while exceeding conservatives' expectations.
When President Trump picked a replacement for the late Justice Antonin Scalia he promised conservatives someone in the same mold — a New Scalia, as legal observers put it.
Two years into his term, Justice Neil M. Gorsuch has exceeded those conservatives’ expectations, carving out a role as a superb writer and careful advocate for the originalist approach to the Constitution that Scalia helped pioneer.
“Being a true originalist, he’s probably a little more Scalia than Scalia,” said Curt Levey, president of the Committee for Justice. “He’s more than lived up to Trump’s promise.”
The comparisons go beyond the legal realm, too. Justice Gorsuch has even built an unlikely friendship with one of the court’s liberal members, Justice Sonia Sotomayor, just as Scalia did with arch-liberal Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg…
An interesting theme in both articles: Gorsuch sometimes reaches politically liberal results through originalism and conservatives are generally very happy with him.
Posted at 6:53 AM