Profile in Courage: Justice Neil Gorsuch

At a time when the government grows larger and more complex by the minute, Justice Neil Gorsuch has emerged as one of the Supreme Court’s clearest voices for restoring the Constitution’s restraints on bureaucracy and protections for liberty. Through his bold (and often unpopular) opinions, willingness to challenge long-held deference to the executive branch, and unyielding effort to expose the human consequences of excessive regulation, Justice Gorsuch has demonstrated the kind of principled courage that the Framers understood was essential to preserving a free society. For fighting the good fight in the courts and the public square, Justice Gorsuch is absolutely a Profile in Courage.

Perhaps nowhere is this courage more evident than in his landmark dissent in Gundy v. United States (2019). The case involved whether Congress had unconstitutionally delegated its legislative authority to the executive branch when it granted the Attorney General broad discretion to impose criminal registration requirements on offenders who were convicted before the statute was enacted. The Supreme Court had long abandoned meaningful enforcement of the Constitution’s nondelegation doctrine—the principle that Congress cannot transfer its core legislative power to executive agencies or private parties. This abdication enabled Congress to evade accountability while empowering unelected bureaucrats to write binding rules affecting millions of Americans.

Justice Gorsuch’s dissent in Gundy, joined by Chief Justice Roberts and Justice Thomas, represented a bold and intellectually rigorous effort to restore this foundational constitutional safeguard. He articulated a clear and workable standard, now widely referred to as the “Gorsuch test”—that would require Congress to make the fundamental policy decisions itself rather than handing off open-ended authority to administrative agencies. The Justice asked a powerful question: “if a single executive branch official can write laws restricting the liberty of this group of persons, what does that mean for the next?”

As Gorsuch explained, the Constitution does not permit Congress to merely declare broad goals and leave executive officials to fill in the details of what the law actually requires. While Congress can empower the executive to “fill up the details” of policy implementation, make application contingent on executive factfinding, and allow other branches to use power that is already in their constitutional domains, anything beyond that cannot be reconciled with the Constitution.

The importance of the Gundy dissent cannot be overstated. It has been repeatedly cited by litigants, scholars, and judges as the modern blueprint for reviving the nondelegation doctrine. Even Justice Alito, who provided the fifth vote to uphold the statute in that case, acknowledged his openness to reconsidering the doctrine in a future case, a hopeful indication that Gorsuch’s reasoning had fundamentally shifted the conversation. What was once a dormant constitutional principle has now reemerged as a serious potential constraint on the administrative state in future holdings (even if not quite ready for the limelight), thanks largely to Gorsuch’s willingness to challenge decades of judicial complacency.

Justice Gorsuch’s concurrence in the recently decided Learning Resources, Inc. v. Trump case further illustrates his commitment to keeping executive power within constitutional bounds. Under the theory offered by the Trump administration, any President could lay any import duty, change rates on a whim, and reshape the global economic order based on misinterpreted provisions of the International Emergency Economic Powers Act. “A ruling for him here, the President acknowledges, would afford future Presidents the same latitude he asserts for himself,” Justice Neil Gorsuch rightly wrote. “So another President might impose tariffs on gas-powered automobiles to respond to climate change. Or, really, on virtually any imports for any emergency any President might perceive.” This mode of governance is completely alien to the one devised in Independence Hall in the steamy summer of 1787.

Justice Gorsuch has also extended his defense of liberty beyond the courtroom. His 2024 book, Over Ruled: The Human Toll of Too Much Law, offers a powerful indictment of the modern regulatory state—not merely in abstract legal terms, but through deeply human stories. He recounts how ordinary Americans such as veterans, small business owners, fishermen, and families have seen their lives upended by obscure regulations and overzealous enforcement.

One particularly frustrating example in the book involves a fisherman who ran afoul of Sarbanes-Oxley Act provisions targeting financial professionals who destroy or obstruct documents in the midst of a federal investigation. The fisherman had allegedly misreported the measurements of his fish, and for that, he spent Christmas in jail and ultimately lost his home and his fishing boat. This wider phenomenon, he argues, undermines the basic principle that laws must be knowable and predictable. When citizens cannot reasonably understand the rules governing their conduct, the rule of law itself begins to erode.

Through his opinions, writings, and overall steadfast commitment to constitutional principles, Justice Neil Gorsuch has reminded officials and the public that the government does not have a blank check of authority. He rightly insists that the Constitution’s protections remain meaningful and are indispensable to America’s 250-year experiment in self-government. For never yielding in his fight for liberty and rule of law, Justice Gorsuch is a Profile in Courage.