Justice Scalia's Supreme Court Replacement To Teach At Scalia Law School

Welcome to legal academia, Professor Gorsuch.

onOctober 3, 2018 at 1:58 PMOctober 3, 2018 at 1:55 PM

Justice Neil Gorsuch

What, you may ask, was Justice Neil Gorsuch up to this summer after he spent the year awkwardly struggling to channel Justice Antonin Scalia’s spirit on the Supreme Court? One law school’s alumni found out yesterday afternoon that he’d apparently been working as a visiting professor at their alma mater.

In curiously underreported news, Justice Gorsuch took up residence overseas this summer to teach courses on national security and separation of powers to students in a program hosted by the National Security Institute at George Mason University’s Antonin Scalia Law School. Alumni received a gushing email about the experience from Dean Henry N. Butler earlier this week:

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From Pilot and Above The Law

With the start of the new school year upon us, I wanted to formally announce that effective this past summer, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Neil M. Gorsuch joined the Scalia Law faculty as a Distinguished Visiting Professor of Law!

Justice Gorsuch joined us this summer in part to teach in the law school’s overseas summer program on national security and separation of power in Padua, Italy, alongside his former law clerk and Scalia Law’s own Jamil Jaffer. One student described the entire experience as “transformative” and “the opportunity of a lifetime.” …

And the good news doesn’t end there: I am delighted to report that Justice Gorsuch will be back with the summer program again in 2019 and will be doing more with the law school going forward!

Given that not all law students at the school are conservative — in fact, according to a poll conducted by GMU law professors, the average student seems to lean “moderate left” — we wonder what else Justice Gorsuch will be doing with Scalia Law in the future, and what student reception will be like. Either way, congratulations to Scalia Law on snagging the high court’s junior justice (as of this writing) as a law professor.

Staci Zaretsky is a senior editor at Above the Law, where she’s worked since 2011. She’d love to hear from you, so please feel free to email her with any tips, questions, comments, or critiques. You can follow her on Twitter or connect with her on LinkedIn.