Gorsuch would like to curb the deference that courts give to federal agencies and is most noted for a strong defense of religious exemptions in cases brought by private companies and religious nonprofit groups objecting to the contraceptive mandate in the Affordable Care Act.
Gorsuch said in a speech last spring that as a judge he had tried to follow Scalia’s path.
“The great project of Justice Scalia’s career was to remind us of the differences between judges and legislators,” Gorsuch told an audience at Case Western Reserve University School of Law in Cleveland.
Legislators “may appeal to their own moral convictions and to claims about social utility to reshape the law as they think it should be in the future,” Gorsuch said. But “judges should do none of these things in a democratic society.”
Instead, they should use “text, structure and history” to understand what the law is, “not to decide cases based on their own moral convictions or the policy consequences they believe might serve society best.”
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