Meet the newest Supreme Court justice - Neil Gorsuch - his rulings say a lot about his judicial style

REUTERS/Kevin Lamarque

Neil Gorsuch listens as President Trump announces his nomination of Gorsuch to be an associate justice of the US Supreme Court at the White House in Washington, DC, January 31, 2017.

Neil Gorsuch on Monday took oaths to be sworn in as the Supreme Court's newest justice at a private ceremony administered by Chief Justice John Roberts and other justices, and then a public ceremony at the White House.

At 49 years old, Gorsuch is the youngest Supreme Court justice since Clarence Thomas, who was 43 when he was confirmed in 1991.

Gorsuch could first serve on the court in oral arguments on April 17. The current term ends in June.

While Gorscuch did not say much during his confirmation hearing about how he will rule on cases, he will no doubt join the court's conservatives, bringing the balance of the bench to five conservatives to four liberals.

Despite Gorsuch's staunch conservative credentials, his history on criminal law is more difficult to pigeonhole. He has ruled in favor of both criminal suspects and police officers on a variety of issues, from excessive force to privacy cases.

Gorsuch, who serves on the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals in Denver, has previously indicated he thinks there are too many federal criminal laws and regulations bogging down the courts.

In a 2013 speech, he criticized the growing number of criminal offenses and regulations have become increasingly difficult to keep up with:

"Without written laws, we lack fair notice of the rules we must obey. But with too many written laws, don't we invite a new kind of fair notice problem? And what happens to individual freedom and equality - and to our very conception of law itself - when the criminal code comes to cover so many facets of daily life that prosecutors can almost choose their targets with impunity?"

Gorsuch has received praise from defense lawyers and other legal experts for often intrepreting laws in favor of defendants, a tendency similar to that of the late Justice Antonin Scalia. Scalia was known for erring on the side of even the most unpopular suspects (he once referred to himself as "the darling of the criminal defense bar").

Other criminal-justice-reform advocates have remained wary. People for the American Way, a liberal advocacy organization, called many of Gorsuch's criminal-justice rulings "troubling," arguing that several of his dissents that favored defendants had been unique. Gorsuch more often dissented against rulings that "vindicated important constitutional rights," the organization said.

Here are some of the most interesting cases Gorsuch has ruled on: