By the time a lawsuit over pollution from a nuclear weapons plant had reached Judge Neil Gorsuch, it had crawled through the courts for more than two decades, outliving some of the landowners who said the contamination destroyed their property values.
That pace didn’t sit well with Gorsuch, a judge for the Denver-based 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, and now President Donald Trump’s nominee for the U.S. Supreme Court.
“This long lingering litigation deserves to find resolution soon,” Gorsuch wrote for the panel, which sent the case back to a lower court to be handled “promptly” in favor of the landowners.
Many conservation groups say Gorsuch is too conservative and too much like the man he would replace, the late Justice Antonin Scalia, to be considered a friend of the environment. But when it comes to his record on issues like pollution and environmental regulations, he can’t be painted as someone who always finds in favor of businesses, according to an Associated Press review of his rulings.
In 2010, Gorsuch sided with the Environmental Protection Agency when a magnesium company challenged the EPA’s new interpretation of a rule regulating byproducts created by the company’s mining operation in Utah. The company argued the EPA couldn’t change the rule without public notice and comment. It said the byproducts were exempted under a previous interpretation, but Gorsuch said that interpretation was “at best” tentative, so the agency was free to change its mind and issue a new one.