Two questions senators should ask Neil Gorsuch about natural law

By S.M. | NEW YORK

DURING the campaign, Donald Trump pledged to name a Supreme Court justice “very much in the mould” of Antonin Scalia, the conservative jurist who died over a year ago. In many respects Neil Gorsuch, whose Senate confirmation hearings begin on March 20th, fits that bill. Like Mr Scalia, Mr Gorsuch, a decade-long veteran of the Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals, has a deeply conservative record. He aims to interpret the constitution in line with its original meaning. He is a clear and elegant writer.

There are some notable contrasts as well. Whereas Mr Scalia savaged his colleagues by likening their views to “pure applesauce” or “the mystical aphorisms of the fortune cookie”, Mr Gorsuch is refined and respectful of those with whom he disagrees. And Mr Trump’s nominee departs from Mr Scalia in a more telling and more worrying way: the role of philosophy in legal deliberation. Judicial adventures in metaphysics were anathema to the man who spent three decades in the seat to which Mr Gorsuch aspires. In a 1997 book, Mr Scalia described the constitution as “a practical and pragmatic charter of government” that neither requires nor permits “philosophising”. In Cruzan v Missouri Department of Health, a right-to-die case in 1990, the man Mr Gorsuch called a “lion of the law” noted that “the nine justices of the court” are no better suited to make fine distinctions regarding the morality of life support than “nine people picked at random from the Kansas City telephone directory”.