From the ABA newsletter: Is Gorsuch the new Scalia?

Posted by Harvard Business Review

From the ABA newsletter: “Is Gorsuch the new Scalia?”

Justice Neil M. Gorsuch has quickly staked out conservative positions and aligned himself with Justice Clarence Thomas since joining the U.S. Supreme Court.

Gorsuch appears to be even more of an originalist than the justice he replaced, the late Antonin Scalia, according to a Wall Street Journal op-ed (sub. req.) by law professors John Yoo of the University of California at Berkeley and Sai Prakash of the University of Virginia.

Scalia once called himself a “fainthearted originalist” and he sometimes adhered to established precedent rather than the constitutional text, according to the professors. Thomas takes more consistent originalist positions.

Scalia wrote the opinion finding an individual right to bear arms under the Second Amendment, but he acknowledged a right to regulate gun possession, Yoo and Prakash say. When the U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear a California case on the right to carry guns in public, Gorsuch joined Thomas in a dissent expressing strong Second Amendment support.

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