Gorsuch, Neil McGill (1967-…), became an associate justice of the Supreme Court of the United States in 2017. President Donald J. Trump named him to fill the vacancy created by the 2016 death of Justice Antonin Scalia . At the time of his nomination, Gorsuch served as a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 10th Circuit, based in Denver , Colorado.
Gorsuch was born on Aug. 29, 1967, in Denver, Colorado, in the Rocky Mountain region of the western United States. His mother, Anne Gorsuch Burford, served as the head of the Environmental Protection Agency from 1981 to 1983, during the administration of President Ronald Reagan . In 1988, Neil Gorsuch earned a bachelor of arts degree in political science from Columbia University in New York City. In 1991, he earned a law degree from Harvard Law School in Cambridge, Massachusetts. In 1992, Gorsuch went to the United Kingdom on a Marshall Scholarship to study at the University of Oxford. He received a doctorate in legal philosophy from the university in 2004.
In 1991 and 1992, Gorsuch worked as a law clerk for a judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. In 1993 and 1994, he served as a clerk for U.S. Supreme Court Associate Justices Byron White and Anthony Kennedy . From 1995 to 2005, Gorsuch was an attorney for a private law firm based in Washington, D.C. In 2005 and 2006, he was deputy associate attorney general for the U.S. Department of Justice under President George W. Bush .
In May 2006, President Bush nominated Gorsuch to fill a vacant seat on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 10th Circuit. The U.S. Senate confirmed the nomination in July. As an appeals court judge, Gorsuch earned a reputation as a conservative because of his opinions on such issues as religious expression, statutory interpretation, and criminal procedure. Conservatives tend to favor traditional values and ideas. In January 2017, President Trump nominated Gorsuch to fill the vacancy on the Supreme Court caused by the death of Associate Justice Antonin Scalia nearly a year earlier. The Senate confirmed Gorsuch’s nomination in April.
