May 18, 2017
Legal commentators seem to have settled on the view that newly confirmed Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch will fill the seat left by the late Justice Antonin Scalia both literally and as a like-minded successor in jurisprudential spirit. In this article, we note that several of Justice Gorsuch’s opinions from his time on the United States Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit suggest that, like Justice Scalia, his views on criminal justice often vary from the “law and order” approach generally associated with judicial conservatives. Specifically, we review Justice Gorsuch’s decision in United States v. Farr, which offers a few clues regarding his thinking on such issues while posing some interesting issues for tax prosecutions, and conclude that only time will tell where Justice Gorsuch will fit on the criminal law spectrum.