A Call For Civility From The Bench
Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch sat down with Fox News Digital this week and said something that should be uncontroversial — and yet feels, in the current political climate, like a genuine act of courage to say plainly.
“We have to be able to hear one another,” Gorsuch said. “And violence is never the answer.”
The remarks came in a wide-ranging interview in which the Trump-appointed justice addressed the rising tide of threats targeting federal judges, the damage inflicted by high-profile leaks of the court’s internal deliberations, and the fragility of the constitutional structures that Americans too often take for granted. Gorsuch spoke at the Reagan Library in Simi Valley, California — a fitting venue for a justice who has spent his career defending the original meaning of the document the Founders drafted behind locked doors.
His comments arrive in an environment that has grown increasingly dangerous for members of the federal judiciary. The 2022 Dobbs leak — which sparked protests outside justices’ homes and ultimately inspired an armed man from California to travel to Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s Maryland residence with a firearm, tactical knife, zip ties, duct tape, and other items in an apparent assassination plot — hangs over everything. Nicholas John Roske was sentenced to eight years in federal prison for the attempted m*rder. More recently, confidential Supreme Court memos from 2016 exchanges between justices were leaked to the press, further eroding the conditions under which judges can deliberate candidly.
On Leaks And The Loss Of Confidentiality
Gorsuch was careful and thoughtful in addressing the tension between transparency and the court’s need for protected deliberation — and he landed on a position that is both principled and practically indispensable.
“There’s a balance between transparency and [the] confidentiality in our work, right?” he said. “I mean, it’s wonderful, I think, that we have the opportunity for people to listen in to our own arguments. You can listen to every word uttered in arguments from the bench today, in real time. At the same time, we also have to be able to talk with one another privately, and discuss our views candidly around the conference table.”
He reached back to the founding to make the point. “The framers thought it was very important that they lock the doors when they were discussing the Constitution,” Gorsuch said. James Madison, he noted, later believed there “would have been no Constitution” without that privacy. The principle is old, tested, and essential: free deliberation requires the knowledge that half-formed views won’t be weaponized before a decision is reached.
When leaks bypass that protection, Gorsuch warned, the risk isn’t merely reputational. It corrupts the very process that makes the court worth trusting in the first place.
“You can read every word I think about a case at the end of the day,” he said. “But do we need some confidentiality? Of course.”
On Independence And The Stakes For Democracy
The deeper concern running through the interview was the condition of judicial independence itself — the constitutional firewall between the courts and political pressure that Gorsuch views as one of the republic’s most essential features.
“Why do we have an independent judiciary?” he asked. “The framers did not want [judges beholden to political forces]… they said you have to have independent judges so that when you come to court, no matter how unpopular you are, you’re going to get fair, neutral application of the law.”
The robustness of the American system, Gorsuch argued, flows precisely from the friction and diversity it builds in — its insistence that competing factions must argue their case on the merits rather than simply prevailing by force of numbers or intimidation. “You think about how robust our system is, where everybody, all factions come into making laws. That makes our decisions wiser than you are ever gonna get in a dictatorship or a monarchy or an oligarchy. They’re much more fragile, aren’t they?”
Around the conference table, he said, there remains a shared foundation even among ideological opposites. “When I sit around the table with my colleagues and we disagree, the one thing I know is that the person across from me loves this country… as much as I do.” The message to those who would threaten or intimidate judges into different outcomes was equally plain: “We can debate, we can disagree. But we have to be able to do it in a way that respects one another.”
For a justice who has spent his career upholding constitutional text against the pressures of the moment, these words carry their own kind of weight.
