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Confident and Assertive, Gorsuch Hurries to Make His Mark

Justice Neil M. Gorsuch, left, and Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. last month outside the Supreme Court.Credit...Stephen Crowley/The New York Times

WASHINGTON — New justices usually take years to find their footing at the Supreme Court. For Justice Neil M. Gorsuch, who joined the court in April, a couple of months seem to have sufficed.

His early opinions were remarkably self-assured. He tangled with his new colleagues, lectured them on the role of the institution he had just joined, and made broad jurisprudential pronouncements in minor cases.

Other justices moved more slowly.

“I was frightened to death for the first three years,” Justice Stephen G. Breyer, who joined the court in 1994, said in a 2006 interview.

Justice Clarence Thomas, who joined the court in 1991, said he had asked his new colleagues how long it would take to hit his stride. “To a person, they said it took three to five years under normal circumstances to adjust to the court,” Justice Thomas said in 1996. His own circumstances, he added, referring to his bruising confirmation hearings, pushed him toward “the outer limits of that period.”

Estimates have not changed over time. “So extraordinary an intellect as Brandeis said it took him four or five years to feel that he understood the jurisprudential problems of the court,” Justice Felix Frankfurter wrote of Justice Louis D. Brandeis, who sat on the court from 1916 to 1939.

Justice Robert H. Jackson rejected Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes’s estimate of three years to “get acclimated,” saying it was “nearer to five.”

Judging by Justice Gorsuch’s early opinions, he is fully acclimated.

In June alone, in addition to his only majority opinion of the term, he wrote seven others: three dissents, three concurrences and a statement urging the court to take up a legal question “at its next opportunity.” By comparison, Justice Elena Kagan, the next most junior justice, wrote seven dissents and concurrences in her first two terms.

Justice Gorsuch cheered his supporters with conservative votes on President Trump’s travel ban, gun rights, money in politics, the separation of church and state and the sweep of the court’s 2015 decision establishing a right to same-sex marriage.

But his most forceful statements came in otherwise forgettable decisions.

Consider Perry v. Merit Systems Protection Board, an exceptionally complicated case about where Civil Service and discrimination claims may be filed.

When the case was argued in April, Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr., who joined the court in 2006, said there was no clear answer to the question. “Who wrote this statute?” he asked. “Somebody who takes pleasure out of pulling the wings off flies?”

“The one thing about this case that seems perfectly clear to me is that nobody who is not a lawyer, and no ordinary lawyer, could read these statutes and figure out what they are supposed to do,” Justice Alito said.

By that standard, Justice Gorsuch is no ordinary lawyer. In dissent, he said the answer was plain, as some kinds of cases belong in one court and other kinds in another. The seven-justice majority had gone astray, he said, in tweaking the statutory arrangement in the name of simplicity to arrive at the conclusion that the claims should all be brought in Federal District Court.

Then he made a larger point.

“If a statute needs repair,” Justice Gorsuch wrote, “there’s a constitutionally prescribed way to do it. It’s called legislation. To be sure, the demands of bicameralism and presentment are real, and the process can be protracted. But the difficulty of making new laws isn’t some bug in the constitutional design: It’s the point of the design, the better to preserve liberty.”

“Congress already wrote a perfectly good law,” he wrote. “I would follow it.”

Commentators wondered whether that vivid writing was a proportional response in a decidedly minor dispute.

“Dude, pick your spots,” Daniel Epps, a law professor at Washington University in St. Louis, said on First Mondays, an entertaining podcast that explores developments at the Supreme Court. “You don’t need to pull out all this stuff in every statutory case.”

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, in a majority opinion joined by Justice Alito and five other members of the court, could barely be bothered to respond to her new colleague. The plaintiff in the case, she wrote, “asks us not to ‘tweak’ the statute, but to read it sensibly.”

Justice Gorsuch’s only majority opinion of the term came in Henson v. Santander Consumer USA. It was about debt collection, and it was unanimous.

Here, too, Justice Gorsuch was ready to swing for the fences.

“While it is of course our job to apply faithfully the law Congress has written,” he wrote, “it is never our job to rewrite a constitutionally valid statutory text under the banner of speculation about what Congress might have done had it faced a question that, on everyone’s account, it never faced.”

In a concurring opinion in Maslenjak v. United States, a case about when naturalized citizens may be stripped of their citizenship, Justice Gorsuch said Justice Kagan, writing for the majority, had provided more guidance than was warranted and proper.

The Supreme Court should announce general principles, he said, and let lower courts fill in the gaps.

Justice Kagan, writing for six members, responded that she had a different conception of the Supreme Court’s role. “Such a halfway decision would fail to fulfill our responsibility to both parties and courts,” she wrote, adding that one federal appeals court had already called the Supreme Court’s failure to provide clear guidance on the subject “maddening.”

Justice Gorsuch, who is 49, concluded his opinion with a nice aphorism of the sort that some justices might have waited decades to deploy.

“This court,” he wrote, “often speaks most wisely when it speaks last.”

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section A, Page 13 of the New York edition with the headline: Confident and Assertive, a New Justice in a Hurry. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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