Neil Gorsuch Quotes

originalism is the worst form of constitutional interpretation, except for all the others.

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.

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.

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.

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, from 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.

But if those blessings are to endure, it falls to each of us to do what we can to preserve and pass down civic understanding and the virtues of civility.

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.

If I cannot convince you that originalism is the proper interpretive theory for our Constitution, I hope to convince you (to borrow from Churchill) that originalism is the worst form of constitutional interpretation, except for all the others.

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.

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.

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.

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."

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.

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.

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?