Gorsuch joins Thomas in a constitutionalist revival

The hearts of constitutional purists are beating harder today after Justice Neil Gorsuch joined Justice Clarence Thomas in a bid to restore sense and meaning to a key, but long ignored, clause of our nation’s founding document.

My colleague Erin Dunne has ably captured the top-line importance of the Supreme Court’s decision reining in an abuse of asset forfeiture laws, via which law-enforcement agencies seize property of those they arrest. I entirely concur with her analysis supporting the result. Beyond that, though, it is the concurring opinions by Gorsuch and Thomas that raise hopes, however faintly, for a return to jurisprudence more rooted in the Constitution’s text than in the expansive imagination of the court’s nine jurists.