In Colorado, Judge Gorsuch is known for his involvement with the outdoors and the local legal community. He lives in unincorporated Boulder County, in a mountain-view community on a property with several horses. He has raised chickens and goats with his teenage daughters, Emma and Belinda, and his wife, Louise, an avid equestrian. He is a black diamond skier and fisherman and hosts regular picnics for his former law clerks with another 10th Circuit judge, Timothy M. Tymkovich.

Judge Gorsuch has not hesitated to take stands that critics say have a partisan edge. He has criticized liberals for turning to the courts rather than legislatures to achieve their policy goals, and has called for limiting the power of federal regulators.

Nan Aron, the president of the Alliance for Justice, a liberal group, said Judge Gorsuch’s stance on federal regulation was “extremely problematic” and “even more radical than Scalia.”

“Not requiring courts to defer to agency expertise when an act of Congress is ambiguous,” she said, “will make it much harder for federal agencies to effectively address a wide variety of critical matters, including labor rights, consumer and financial protections, and environmental law.”

In a 2005 essay in National Review, written before he became a judge, he criticized liberals for preferring litigation to the political process.

“American liberals have become addicted to the courtroom, relying on judges and lawyers rather than elected leaders and the ballot box, as the primary means of effecting their social agenda on everything from gay marriage to assisted suicide to the use of vouchers for private-school education,” he wrote. “This overweening addiction to the courtroom as the place to debate social policy is bad for the country and bad for the judiciary.”

Image Mr. Gorsuch with other members of the Lincoln’s Inn Society at Harvard Law School, in a photo from the school’s 1990 yearbook. Credit... Harvard Law School Yearbook

Like Justice Scalia, Judge Gorsuch is a lively and accessible writer. Consider the first paragraph of a 2011 libel decision, which dispensed with the throat-clearing and jargon that characterizes many judicial opinions.