The Top 3 Contenders for Trump’s Supreme Court Nomination

http://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/31/us/politics/hardiman-gorsuch-pryor-justice.html

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WASHINGTON — President Trump intends to announce his much-anticipated choice to fill the Supreme Court’s vacant seat from the White House on Tuesday evening.

The president’s aides have said the nominee will come from a list of 21 potential candidates released by Mr. Trump’s presidential campaign in September. But the choice is believed to have come down to three finalists.

They are Thomas M. Hardiman of the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit, sitting in Pittsburgh; Neil M. Gorsuch of the Denver-based 10th Circuit; and William H. Pryor Jr. of the Atlanta-based 11th Circuit.

Here’s a closer look at the finalists.

Judge Hardiman, a graduate of the University of Notre Dame and Georgetown University Law Center, has built a reputation as a conservative over more than a decade on federal courts and earlier in private practice.

He was first appointed to the Federal District Court in Pittsburgh in 2003 by President George W. Bush and then elevated four years later to the Third Circuit. In that position, he has served alongside Mr. Trump’s sister, Judge Maryanne Trump Barry, who is said to have recommended him for the Supreme Court.

Judge Hardiman, 51, has earned a reputation as a defender of gun rights, with several of his most notable opinions coming in Second Amendment cases.

He has also frequently taken the side of law enforcement. In one case, in 2010, Judge Hardiman’s majority opinion allowed New Jersey officials to strip-search people arrested for any offense before admitting them to a jail, regardless of whether the authorities had reason to suspect the possession of contraband.

And in a case last May, Judge Hardiman signed on to a decision that ruled asylum seekers were not entitled to file habeas corpus petitions to prevent or postpone their removal from the country while challenging their deportation orders.

Judge Gorsuch’s credentials are the most traditional of the finalists: degrees from Columbia, Harvard Law School and Oxford, as well as a clerkship on the Supreme Court.

His mother, Anne M. Gorsuch, served as the administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency under President Ronald Reagan. And after his clerkship, Judge Gorsuch spent a decade in private practice at a Washington law firm and two years at the Justice Department.

Mr. Bush appointed Judge Gorsuch, 49, to the 10th Circuit in 2006. There, he has earned a reputation as an originalist, trying to interpret the Constitution in accord with the understanding of those who drafted and adopted it. That approach generally leads to conservative decisions, but Judge Gorsuch has written little on several issues of interest to the right, including gay rights and gun control.

He does, however, have a strong record of favoring religious freedom over other values, built largely on two prominent cases in which he sided with employers who objected for religious reasons to providing some forms of contraception coverage. Both cases, which involved Hobby Lobby Stores and the Little Sisters of the Poor, were eventually considered by the Supreme Court.

An outspoken conservative, Judge Pryor has called Roe v. Wade, the 1973 Supreme Court decision establishing a constitutional right to abortion, “the worst abomination of constitutional law in our history.”

He is also a strong opponent of gay rights. As the attorney general of Alabama in 2003, Judge Pryor wrote a brief encouraging the Supreme Court to uphold a Texas law that criminalized gay sex.

Judge Pryor, 54, attended law school at Tulane University and worked in private practice in Birmingham. He is close to Senator Jeff Sessions of Alabama, serving as his deputy when Mr. Sessions was the state’s attorney general and taking his place when Mr. Sessions was elected to the Senate. (Mr. Sessions is now Mr. Trump’s nominee for attorney general.)

He was first appointed to the United States Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit temporarily by Mr. Bush during a Senate recess in 2004. He was confirmed by the Senate a year later, but not before sharp criticism from Democrats who challenged the appointment.

Despite his record, Judge Pryor has not been immune from criticism on the right. He joined a 2011 decision allowing a transgender woman to sue for sexual discrimination that attracted critiques despite Supreme Court precedent.