Before he was Donald Trump’s nominee to fill the vacancy on the supreme court, Judge Neil Gorsuch was the protege of a renowned Catholic scholar at Oxford University who has compared same-sex relations to bestiality and described abortion as the “approved killing of vulnerable innocent human beings”.

During the years preceding his federal judgeship on the 10th circuit court of appeals Gorsuch studied for a doctorate at University College Oxford under the supervision of Prof John Finnis, a 76-year-old Australian legal scholar considered one of the world’s foremost thinkers on the philosophy of natural law. Finnis has also taught at Notre Dame, a Catholic research university in Indiana, since 1995.

This period in Gorsuch’s life has been hailed as evidence of his academic prowess, but these formative years may also provide an insight into the foundation of his intellectual conservatism as Republicans hope the 49-year-old becomes the natural heir to rightwing supreme court justice Antonin Scalia’s textualist and originalist approach, meaning a literal interpretation of the US constitution’s original meaning.

Gorsuch took up a Marshall scholarship to study at Oxford in 1992 and studied there for two years, eventually completing his doctorate in 2004. He and Finnis appear to have remained close ever since. Gorsuch also met his wife, Louise, who is British, during his time at the university.

Although Gorsuch has not formally stated his opinion on the landmark Roe v Wade supreme court ruling, which established the right to abortion, his work on euthanasia, under the tutelage of Finnis, has been interpreted as some of the clearest evidence of his likely pro-life views. Gorsuch’s 2006 book The Future of Assisted Suicide and Euthanasia, an extension of his Oxford doctoral thesis, made the secular argument that “the intentional taking of human life by private persons is always wrong”.

Gorsuch was studying at Oxford as some of Finnis’s views were drawing controversy on the world stage. In 1994 Finnis had written that “a life involving homosexual conduct is bad even for anyone unfortunate enough to have innate or quasi innate homosexual inclinations”. In the same paper he described “the evil of homosexual conduct”.

The same year, during a speech at Harvard University in April, Finnis was reportedly booed by campus protesters who labelled him a “hate monger” and a “homophobe” and compared his invitation to lecture to giving the grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan a platform.

The state of Colorado called upon Finnis to articulate a philosophical argument in favor of a voter initiative that barred protections for gay, lesbian and bisexual people, and the late Justice Antonin Scalia echoed his reasoning in a supreme court dissent. His work also served as the underpinnings for several states’ argument to the supreme court in favor of banning gay marriage.

Another key theme for Finnis has been migration and its effect on nationhood. In 2009 he wrote about how England’s population had “largely given up … bearing children at a rate consistent with their community’s medium-term survival”. He warned they were on a path to “their own replacement, as a people, by other peoples, more or less regardless of the incomers’ compatibility of psychology, culture, religion or political ideas and ambitions, or the worth or viciousness of those ideas and ambitions”.

In the same paper, he wrote: “European states in the early twenty-first century move … into a trajectory of demographic and cultural decay … population transfer and replacement by a kind of reverse colonization.”

He warned of coming “ethnic and religious inter-communal miseries of hatred, bloodshed and political paralysis reminiscent of late twentieth century Yugoslavia’s or the Levant’s”.

Finnis converted from the Church of England to Catholicism at the end of his first term in Oxford in 1962 and his legal thinking was shaped thereafter by his Christian conscience and the idea of a clear moral difference between good and bad. He advised the Pontifical Commission for Justice and Peace, and in 1986, did work for the British and Irish bishops and the Vatican. In the mid-1980s he wrote a book on nuclear deterrence which said it was wrong to threaten to murder millions of people. On immigration he had lamented the decline of the idea of nations and peoples as a valuable concept today.

Later this month he will become an honorary Queen’s Counsel, a recognition by the UK government of his academic achievements. The citation describes his “prolific and peerless contribution to legal scholarship”.

When contacted by the Guardian at his home in Oxford, Finnis declined to comment on Gorsuch’s nomination, saying: “I have resolved not to say anything to anyone at all.”

Neil Gorsuch studied at Oxford under Prof John Finnis and the two remain close. Photograph: Alex Wong/Getty Images

Gorsuch has acknowledged Finnis’s guidance in the years since he completed his doctorate. When Gorsuch published his 2006 book on euthanasia, he thanked Finnis for his “kind support through draft after draft”.

In 2011, when Notre Dame ran a symposium to celebrate Finnis’s work, Gorsuch recalled his study under Finnis, telling the audience: “It was a time when legal giants roamed among Oxford’s spires.” Finnis was one of the “great scholars” along with Ronald Dworkin and Joseph Raz. Gorsuch recalled the “gentle but exacting cross-examinations we endured while sweating next to the coal fire in his panelled college room”.

Prof Patrick Lee, who also spoke at the seminar but had met neither Finnis nor Gorsuch before, told the Guardian the mutual respect between the two was clear.

“Finnis was very proud of him [Gorsuch] for the work he’s done. Not only the dissertation, but the work he’s done on the bench,” Lee, a professor of philosophy at the Franciscan University of Steubenville, Ohio, said. He added: “I think Judge Gorsuch was very respectful and when you read his paper, he owes a lot, in terms of his own thinking, to John Finnis.”

A representative for Gorsuch from the White House did not respond to a request for comment.

Finnis also played a controversial role in the legal battle over gay and lesbian rights in America. In 1993, he was tapped by the then Colorado solicitor general, Timothy Tymkovich, to help defend a 1992 state constitutional amendment that broadly restricted the state from protecting gay, lesbian and bisexual people from discrimination. Tymkovich is now the chief judge of the 10th circuit of appeals, where Gorsuch sat as a circuit judge before his nomination to the supreme court on Tuesday.



It was a time when many arguments about LGBT rights rested on assertions about “traditional marriage”. Finnis was called upon to argue that antipathy toward LGBT people – specifically, toward gay sex – was rooted not just in religious traditions but in western law and society at large.

In part of his deposition, which the New Republic reprinted in truncated form in 1993, Finnis compared same-sex relations to bestiality and argued that the act “treats human sexual capacities in a way that is deeply hostile to the self-understanding of those … who are willing to commit themselves to real marriage”.

“Copulation of humans with animals is repudiated because it treats human sexual activity and satisfaction as something appropriately sought in a manner that, like the coupling of animals, is divorced from the expressing of an intelligible common good – and so treats human bodily life, in one of its most intense activities, as merely animal. The deliberate genital coupling of persons of the same sex is repudiated for a very similar reason,” his brief continued, according to the New Republic.

The Colorado state supreme court blocked the measure in 1994, and in 1996, so did the US supreme court, a year after Gorsuch had left the institution as a clerk to associate justice Byron White and then Anthony Kennedy.

Echoes of Finnis’s testimony – parts of which Concerned Women for America, a conservative Christian political advocacy group, presented to the supreme court in its amicus brief – showed up in Justice Antonin Scalia’s dissenting opinion. One phrase Scalia seems to have lifted from Finnis directly is “special homosexual rights laws”, in a passage warning about the consequences of striking down Amendment 2.

Finnis’s writings have also served as the underpinnings for amicus briefs in support of California’s Proposition 8, which eliminated same-sex marriage.

In a similar fashion to abortion, there is limited public understanding of Gorsuch’s views on same sex marriage and LGBT issues.

Some who know the Colorado jurist say it is difficult to assess precisely how much of an influence the Oxford philosopher’s views would have on him if he were to take up his position on the bench.

Prof Richard Collins, who teaches at the University of Colorado Boulder where Gorsuch is a visiting professor said he had never mentioned that Finnis, a superstar of the academic world, had supervised his doctorate.

“He [Gorsuch] is very circumspect. He doesn’t leap out with his viewpoints. He’s very dignified, polite, courteous in style. He doesn’t blather forth his opinions,” said Collins, who also attends the same church as Gorsuch and his family.

“Obviously these things [Finnis’s views] aren’t irrelevant, because we’re talking about the habit of mind – the capability of seeing inferences and so forth,” said Lee. “But given his constitutional philosophy, and given his constitutional [duty] to operate as a judge, it’s not going to have an effect.

“When you get to the question about constitutional law … it’s not a question about what the law should be, it’s a question about what the law is.”

Gorsuch too was careful to state his personal politics would not influence him on the bench. During a press conference on Tuesday he said: “It is the role of judges to apply, not alter, the work of the people’s representatives. A judge who likes every outcome he reaches is very likely a bad judge stretching for results he prefers rather than those the law demands.”