Trump's Supreme Court nominee's hearing is Monday - his rulings say a lot about his judicial style
REUTERS/Kevin Lamarque
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 recieved some praise from defense attorneys and 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:
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