Justice Gorsuch Wastes No Time Stirring Up Trouble

It’s customary for new Supreme Court justices to ease into the job. Not so Justice Neil Gorsuch, who has flung himself into his truncated first term like a whirlwind. Now that the dust has settled, it’s clear that Gorsuch wants to establish himself as the new leader of the court’s conservative wing -- fast. No opinion is a better indicator than his dissent from the court’s summary reversal in the Arkansas gay adoption case, Pavan v. Smith.

The case involved a legal holdover from before the court’s landmark 2015 gay-marriage decision, Obergefell v. Hodges. Arkansas law generally requires the name of a married mother’s husband to appear on her child’s birth certificate, whether he’s the biological father or not. This rule meant, among other things, that couples who conceived using a sperm donor could nonetheless have the names of the two birth parents on the certificate.