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Sometimes small gestures can have unexpected consequences. Major initiatives practically guarantee them. In our time, few pieces of federal legislati… - Neil Gorsuch
" "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.
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About Neil Gorsuch
Neil McGill Gorsuch (August 29, 1967) is an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States. Gorsuch is a proponent of textualism in statutory interpretation, originalism in interpreting the U.S. Constitution, and is an advocate of natural law philosophy.
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Native Name:
Neil McGill Gorsuch
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Neil M. Gorsuch
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Additional quotes by Neil Gorsuch
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.
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."
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Judicial decisions, as well, contain vital information about how all our laws and rules operate. Today, most of these decisions can be found on searchable electronic databases, but some come with high subscription fees. If you can't afford those, you may have to consult a library. Good luck finding what you need there: reported federal decisions now fill 5,000 volumes Each volume clocks in at about 1,000 pages, for a total of more than 5 million pages. Back in 1997, Thomas Baker, a law professor, found taht "the cumulative output of all the lower federal courts... amounts to a small, but respectable library that, when stacked end-to-end, runs for one-and-one-half football fields." One can only wonder how many football fields we're up to now.
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