Hanging on a wall in Justice Neil Gorsuch’s chambers at the Supreme Court, watching silently over law clerks who rotate through the building every term, is a large and looming reminder of the conservative legal icon who previously occupied the space.
The figure, with dark eyes and an unflinching stare, doesn’t weigh much and has made a cross-country trek between Colorado and Washington, D.C., not once, not twice, but three times. Atop its head is greenery that changes with the seasons — currently, it’s outfitted with a crown of pink flowers that will soon give way to fall leaves.
His name is Leroy. His species is elk. And his previous owner is Justice Antonin Scalia.
The story of how Gorsuch ended up with Leroy was detailed in the justice’s new book, A Republic, If You Can Keep It, which hit shelves this month, and the justice recalled how Leroy ended up in his possession during a recent interview in his office at the Supreme Court.
It was Scalia who bagged the elk during a hunting trip in Colorado with a former law clerk more than a decade ago and displayed it in his office — now occupied by Gorsuch — at the high court. But after Scalia died in 2016, Gorsuch writes Leroy’s imposing size indicated he “was destined to become homeless.”
Unclaimed as Scalia’s chambers were emptied, Supreme Court carpenters built a box to ship Leroy back to the former clerk in Colorado, where the elk sat in a garage, Gorsuch said. But the clerk joked that if Gorsuch was picked by President Trump to succeed Scalia on the Supreme Court, Leroy would become his.
And thus when Gorsuch landed the nomination, he also landed Leroy.
The elk head was presented to Gorsuch during a reunion of Scalia’s law clerks, which he attended as the companion of Maureen Scalia, the late justice’s wife.
Today, he hangs on a wall in Gorsuch’s chambers, returning home, albeit with a different owner.
“[T]he truth is, I am delighted to share space with Leroy because it happens that we share a few things in common,” Gorsuch writes. “We are both native Coloradans. Neither of us will ever forget Justice Scalia. And we’ve both been crated and jumbled across the country to serve out our remaining time on display at the Supreme Court of the United States.”
During the 2016 presidential campaign, Trump promised to appoint judges in Scalia’s mold, and he was praised for doing so with his selection of Gorsuch as his Supreme Court nominee in 2017.
Gorsuch said it was Scalia who introduced him to originalism, a judicial philosophy that says the Constitution should be interpreted as to its text and original public meaning, during a lecture at Harvard Law School in the late 1980s.
The lecture, Gorsuch wrote, “was suffused with the conviction that when charged with interpreting congressional statutes and constitutional texts, judges should follow the law as written and original understood, and that judges who seek to do anything else act inconsistently with the judicial function in our system of separated powers.”
“It was a breath of fresh air, inspiring, like little I had heard in my classes,” Gorsuch wrote of Scalia’s lecture.
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