Where Neil Gorsuch Would Fit on the Supreme Court

In nominating Judge Neil M. Gorsuch to the Supreme Court, President Trump chose a jurist who closely shares the conservative legal philosophy of Justice Antonin Scalia, the man whose seat he would fill if confirmed, according to a study analyzing the ideologies of potential nominees.

Judge Gorsuch, 49, is also “interesting because he looks most like the current justices, putting ideology aside,” Lee Epstein of Washington University, one of the report’s authors, said, noting his degrees from Ivy League universities and a clerkship at the Supreme Court. “He’s a nominee it’s going to be hard not to confirm.”

The authors predict Judge Gorsuch, a federal appeals court judge in Denver, would be a reliable conservative, “voting to limit gay rights, uphold restrictions on abortion and invalidate affirmative action programs.”

Should he be confirmed, the court will return to a familiar dynamic, with Justice Anthony M. Kennedy holding the decisive vote in many closely divided cases.

“He’s probably one of the least likely to drift once he got on the court,” Ms. Epstein said of Judge Gorsuch.

The study — prepared by Ms. Epstein, Andrew D. Martin of the University of Michigan and Kevin Quinn of the University of California, Berkeley — updates an earlier analysis. It uses Martin-Quinn scores, which are based on voting patterns, to measure ideology for current justices. The estimate of Judge Gorsuch’s ideology is based on his Judicial Common Space score, which was measured using the ideology of the Republican senator from his home state of Colorado at the time of his nomination to the appeals court by George W. Bush.

Another measure of ideology that looks at political donations places Judge Gorsuch in a similar position on the conservative end of the spectrum.

Research by a group of professors at Stanford, The University of Chicago, Northwestern and Harvard found that based on his campaign contributions before becoming a federal judge, Judge Gorsuch is estimated to be more conservative than 87 percent of all other federal judges — the nation’s primary pool of potential Supreme Court justices.