Neil Gorsuch is a singularly fascinating pick for the current Supreme Court. That may be a strange thing to say about a federal judge who graduated from Harvard Law School, like all the other justices. (Except those who went to Yale, and Elena Kagan, who was solicitor general—the government’s top lawyer at the Court, commonly called “the Tenth Justice”—rather than a judge.)
I’m not even talking about the diversity that the Coloradan would bring to the high court, as the only Protestant on a bench of Catholics and Jews, the only “genuine Westerner” — to quote the late Justice Antonin Scalia, who didn’t count California — and the only holder of a doctorate (in legal philosophy, from Oxford).



Judge Gorsuch is such an interesting choice because he’s an intellectual who writes like a novelist and a “conservative” judge who defies expectations of what conservatives are like.
Perhaps most remarkably, this jurisprudential rock star with a healthy skepticism for federal power has been nominated by Donald Trump. Both temperamentally and in approach to government, the genteel Gorsuch couldn’t be more different from Trump. And yet any Republican president would be fĂȘted for making this choice, one that should appeal to social conservatives, libertarians, establishmentarians, and even the populists who simply want “the best judges.”
Look at a now-viral speech Gorsuch gave at Case Western Reserve University last year, in honor of the man whom he hopes to succeed. “I was taking a breather in the middle of a ski run with little on my mind but the next mogul field when my phone rang with the news (of Scalia’s death),” he said, describing how he completed the run in tears.