Neil Gorsuch takes his seat at the Supreme Court today

By S.M. | SAN DIEGO

BYRON WHITE, the first Coloradan to become an associate justice, saw 13 seats change hands during more than three decades on America’s Supreme Court. Each new justice represents not just a judge filling a chair, Mr White said, but a transformed court, a new court. Today, as a second justice from Colorado takes his seat, Neil Gorsuch is expected to return the Supreme Court to the 5-4 conservative majority that reigned for nearly five decades until Antonin Scalia died in February last year. Before he is publicly feted at the White House and sworn in by his old boss, Justice Anthony Kennedy, Mr Gorsuch will be welcomed by his eight new colleagues in a private investiture ceremony at the court. After a brief stint in Chief Justice John Marshall’s historic 19th-century chair, Mr Gorsuch will slide into his own high-backed, leather-appointed chair on the far-right end of the bench.

Mr Gorsuch has been described by friends and critics alike as a judge in the mould of Mr Scalia, and his record reveals he is likely to vote in line with his predecessor on most issues. Several examinations of Mr Gorsuch’s decade as a judge on the Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals predict he may wind up somewhere to the right of Mr Scalia—and perhaps as conservative as Justices Samuel Alito or Clarence Thomas. Wherever he settles ideologically, Mr Gorsuch will not match Mr Scalia vote for vote. Nor will the 113th justice emulate his tone: where Mr Scalia would call a colleague’s reasoning “legalistic argle-bargle” or “pure applesauce”, Mr Gorsuch’s manner tends toward the polite and understated. In both style and substance, he is likely to depart from the man he lauds as a “lion of the law”.

A watchword of Mr Scalia’s jurisprudence was deference. The Sicilian justice, a Ronald Reagan appointee, preached judicial modesty over his nearly 30 years on the bench. He often gave autonomy to administrative agencies to act on their own reasonable interpretations of federal law. When a provision of a congressional statute was ambiguous, he’d usually defer to the bureaucrats in the Federal Communications Commission or the Internal Revenue Service to read the law their way. This principle, so-called Chevron deference, stemmed from a case in the 1980s granting the benefit of the doubt to the Environmental Protection Agency in its reading of the Clean Air Act.

And Mr Scalia was even more emphatic about not second-guessing the conclusions of democratic majorities. True, he did not always bow to the wisdom of the legislature. In two recent cases—Citizens United v FEC and Shelby County v Holder—he substituted his judgment for that of large congressional majorities that had passed, respectively, campaign-finance and voting-rights laws. But when it came to questions of political morality, the famously devout Roman Catholic justice often put his own convictions aside, or claimed to. In a 1990 right-to-die case concerning the tragic story of a comatose young woman, Mr Scalia averred that nine justices on the Supreme Court are no better suited to parse end-of-life moral questions than “nine people picked at random from the Kansas City telephone directory”. Similarly, his full-throated dissent in Obergefell v Hodges, the 2015 case opening marriage laws to same-sex couples, focused not on the immorality of gay marriage but on democratic theory. The decision, he wrote, was nothing less than a “judicial putsch”. If the people of Michigan, Ohio, Alabama or Texas want to limit marriage to opposite-sex couples, Mr Scalia wrote, “a majority of the nine lawyers on the Supreme Court” are in no position to decide they can’t.

Faint echoes of this stance were heard in Mr Gorsuch’s Senate confirmation hearings when he repeatedly insisted his personal views have nothing to do with his judicial rulings. He spoke of the judge’s role as constrained. He asserted, and re-asserted, his judicial humility. But there are two significant signs that as Donald Trump’s first Supreme Court nominee gets to work, he may envision his job in more muscular terms than did Mr Scalia.

First is Mr Gorsuch’s scepticism of Chevron deference. Lower-court judges are generally bound to follow Supreme Court precedent, yet in last year’s Gutierrez-Brizuela v Lynch, Mr Gorsuch went a bit maverick. In a widely discussed concurrence in that case, Mr Gorsuch called into question the very basis for the Chevron principle. Chevron allows agencies to “swallow huge amounts of core judicial and legislative power,” he wrote, “and concentrate federal power in a way that seems more than a little difficult to square with the constitution of the framers’ design”. He suggested that “maybe the time has come to face the behemoth” and fundamentally rethink Chevron.

Another reason to raise an eyebrow at the aw-shucks I’m-not-here-to-impose-my-will-on-anybody deference peppering Mr Gorsuch’s dodge-and-weave performance before the Senate Judiciary Committee last month is more than 300 pages long: his book, “The Future of Assisted Suicide and Euthanasia”, published in 2006. No senator apparently took the time to read the book. Had they perused chapter 9, they would have found an argument directly linking his moral commitment—that it is “always wrong” for one person to end another person’s life—to a legal position regarding laws permitting doctors to assist their terminally ill patients who wish to end their lives. Such a law, he suggested, is wrong. It should be subjected to heightened judicial scrutiny since it discriminates against people who are not terminally ill. Any time a court applies this higher level of scrutiny, chances are high it will strike the law down. In other words, a justice schooled in the tradition of natural law is better suited to answer life-and-death questions than people chosen at random from the phone book.

It typically takes some time to get a sense how the court will be reshaped by a new justice. But Mr Gorsuch is diving into the job at an unusual time: days before the final two weeks of oral arguments of the term. With this highly compressed time frame, the new justice and his just-hired quartet of clerks have some late nights ahead. The justices will meet on April 13th to discuss cases they may take on for next year, including a gun-rights case from California and a conflict between religious liberty and gay rights in his home state of Colorado. And on April 19th, Mr Gorsuch will take part in a major church-state case out of Missouri. That case, Trinity Lutheran Church v Comer, may well produce the first ruling on which Mr Gorsuch’s vote clinches a 5-4 conservative victory.