Las Vegas Review-Journal (Sunday)
Personally warm Gorsuch enjoys cold truth of law
Nominee believes happy outcomes not judge’s job
WASHINGTON — It’s poker night in a row house on Cranham Street, Oxford, England, and Neil Gorsuch, studying for yet another degree, is feeling down. His housemates decide that what Gorsuch needs is a girlfriend.
Accounts differ on whether it was a dare, goading or a gentle prod, but Gorsuch phones a woman he had clicked with during a school dinner more than a year earlier — and she doesn’t remember him. Awkward. That 1994 phone call might be one of the few times that Gorsuch, a federal judge nominated for the Supreme Court by President Donald Trump, didn’t immediately stand out from the crowd. Louise Burletson agreed to go out with him anyway and ultimately married the man Trump now describes as “perfect in almost every way” for the high court.
Gorsuch, whose Senate confirmation hearings begin Monday, is roundly described by colleagues and friends as a silver-haired combination of wicked smarts, down-to-earth modesty, disarming warmth and careful deliberation.
Critics largely agree. But even so, they don’t think he belongs on the court, believing him too quick to side with conservative and business interests at the expense of working Americans and the poor.
At age 49, Gorsuch already has marked his 10th anniversary as an appellate judge in Colorado, styling himself in the mold of the late Justice Antonin Scalia, the conservative powerhouse whom he would replace.
In his writings and lectures , Gorsuch offers himself as a “workaday judge,” one wearing “honest, unadorned black polyester” robes from a uniform supply store.
Gorsuch is the dad whose standing birthday present from his family is an agreement to watch a Western with him.
He’s the sports nut who jogs with his law clerks, teaches them the Zen of fly fishing and waits at the top of the ski slopes to see which of them he will need to help up after a fall.
He’s the writerly judge who crafts his opinions with uncommon clarity, going so far as to diagram a sentence in one ruling.
“He’s someone who knows the names of the security guards at the courthouse and gets to know who their families are,” says former law clerk Theresa Wardon.
“He’s the kind of person who talks about law for fun,” says Joshua Goodbaum, another former clerk.
He’s also the judge who wrote that a university’s six-month sick leave policy was “more than sufficient” for a cancer patient who sought more time off when a flu epidemic hit, and she worried about how an infection might affect her weakened immune system.
Says Ilyse Hogue, president of NARAL Pro-Choice America: “I’m hearing he’s a really nice guy. That’s way too low a bar for a jurist on the highest court in the land.”
As he was introduced to the nation, Gorsuch said it’s not his job to engineer happy endings:
“A judge who likes every outcome he reaches is very likely a bad judge, stretching for results he prefers rather than those the law demands.”