Summary
When Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia delivered the Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. Lecture at Harvard Law School on Valentine’s Day in 1989, he made quite an impression on a first-year law student from Colorado named Neil Gorsuch.
Scalia spoke on “The Rule of Law as a Law of Rules,” a legal philosophy in which judges limit their discretion by adhering to the letter of the Constitution, laws and court precedents. Just months later, he sided with the majority in declaring that flag-burning is constitutionally protected speech — a result he would have opposed, he said countless times thereafter, “if I were king.”
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“He is unfailingly charming and collegial and will try to build bridges,” says Michael McConnell, who served alongside Gorsuch on the 10th Circuit before becoming director of the Constitutional Law Center at Stanford Law School.
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