Neil Gorsuch’s conservatism is different from Antonin Scalia’s

CONFIRMATION hearings for Supreme Court justices have become frustrating affairs. Senators pontificate and probe while nominees utter bromides and dodge questions for hours on end. In his stint before the Judiciary Committee this week, Neil Gorsuch, Donald Trump’s pick for the court, has been especially tight-lipped. Senators have elicited only glimmers of what makes the 49-year-old judge with a decade on the Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals most interesting, or most worrisome: his affinity for a family of legal theories called “natural law”. Though Mr Trump promotes his nominee as drawn from the mould of Antonin Scalia, the conservative jurist Mr Gorsuch was tapped to replace, he represents a stark departure from a central feature of Mr Scalia’s jurisprudence.

Mr Scalia saw the constitution as “a practical and pragmatic charter of government” that neither requires nor permits “philosophising”. In a right-to-die case in 1990, he quipped that the nine justices were no better suited to make fine distinctions on the morality of life support than “nine people picked at random from the Kansas City telephone directory”. By contrast, Mr Gorsuch seems more ready to let his philosophical judgments out. Tapping into a tradition that reaches back to Thomas Aquinas and Aristotle, natural law says that some things are objectively good in themselves and should therefore serve as lodestars for individuals and societies. John Finnis, Mr Gorsuch’s dissertation adviser at Oxford and one of the world’s foremost natural-law theorists, lists these goods as knowledge, aesthetic appreciation, play, friendship, practical reasonableness, religion and—most notably—life.