Now that the court has handed down its final opinions in argued cases for the 2025-26 term, Supreme Court observers must account not only for what has been decided but, on a lighter note, the most recent children’s book written by a justice. And as we celebrate the 250th anniversary of the nation’s founding, the spotlight is on Neil Gorsuch’s Heroes of 1776, co-written with Janie Nitze, his former law clerk.
Gorsuch is not the only justice to have written for young readers. Indeed, Justice Sonia Sotomayor has written five children’s books while Ketanji Brown Jackson recently published a young-adult version of her memoir Lovely One. More than two decades ago, Justice Sandra Day O’Connor published Chico, the first children’s book by a justice. Chico tells the story of a young girl named Sandra who lives on a ranch with her beloved horse; drama and life lessons ensue after they encounter a rattlesnake on a ride far from home.
The phenomenon of justices writing children’s books has been noted and – par for the course in our highly partisan era – criticized by some. The Economist has written about justices building their own brands. Writing a book, even one for young readers, is certainly a way to do that, although it may be a bit unseemly for a public servant to appear to be cashing on his or her celebrity.
Moreover, there seems to be tension between a justice’s commitment to showing the public that the court is an impartial institution above the fray, on the one hand, and promoting books on partisan media outlets. When Gorsuch goes on Fox News and states the justices’ disagreements over how to interpret the Constitution have “nothing to do with politics,” for example, the medium gets a bit in the way of the message. As an article on Bloomberg Law noted in May, “Where Gorsuch chose to talk about his new children’s book” – the National Review, Reason, and Hugh Hewitt’s radio show, along with Fox News, CBS news, ABC News, and with David French of the New York Times – “shows how the court’s liberal-conservative divide can extend even to the justices’ publicity tours.”
Having acknowledged these concerns, what if, instead of continuing to pile on, we take Gorsuch at his word? In the parlance of one of his favorite interpretive methodologies, if we apply a textualist approach to Heroes of 1776, can we learn something about the justice who co-wrote the book? I believe we can, especially when we compare Heroes to Sotomayor’s Just Ask!, her children’s book published in 2019.
So let’s do just that.
***
Aesthetically, Heroes of 1776 is a masterpiece. The artwork is beautiful. The writing is also dramatic and, for a children’s book, quite sophisticated. Amazon says the 48-page book is intended for students from preschool through third grade but adds that customers say the reading age is “7+” years. Indeed, the book could easily be assigned to fifth grade students without insulting their intelligence.
In his judicial opinions, Gorsuch can be a compelling storyteller. Just one example: In 2015, as a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 10th Circuit, Gorsuch provided a vivid account of the pretrial developments in a medical malpractice case. While teaching the case in my Civil Procedure course to explain how the pleading, discovery, and scheduling rules inform the strategic choices made by counsel, I tell students that they never will read a more engrossing account of a party’s request to amend a final pretrial order under Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 16(e). And then there are lines such as this: “For all our extensive pretrial procedures, even the most meticulous trial plan today probably remains no more reliable a guide than the script in a high school play – provisional at best and with surprising deviations guaranteed.”
More recently, one of Gorsuch’s most well-known opinions, Bostock v. Clayton County, which addressed whether the protections of a federal civil rights law extend to gay and transgender persons, also demonstrated his crisp writing. There, Gorsuch distilled the essence of the case in a single sentence: It “is impossible to discriminate against a person for being homosexual or transgender without discriminating against that individual based on sex.”
Heroes of 1776 demonstrates such excellent writing: the book employs short sentences with active verbs, pays close attention to the chronology of events, and has an eye for telling detail. Everyone knows about John Hancock’s overly large signature on the Declaration of Independence. But what about the “smaller and wobblier” signature of Rhode Island’s Stephen Hopkins? It isn’t that Hopkins “lacked courage,” Gorsuch and Nitze explain. “Hopkins suffered an illness that made his hands shake. Usually, he let others write for him, but today he wanted to do it alone. ‘My hand trembles,’ he announced as he signed, ‘but my heart does not!’”
Substantively, Heroes aligns with Gorsuch’s jurisprudence. It’s not surprising that an originalist would devote his first children’s book to the story of the Declaration of Independence, and it’s not surprising that Gorsuch would tell a tale that celebrates liberty, limited government, and popular sovereignty.
But Gorsuch also attempts to deal with – or at least acknowledge – the limits of the founders’ commitment to the principles they championed. Gorsuch and his coauthor recognize that even as the Declaration of Independence proclaimed that “all men are created equal,” slavery existed in the colonies and women’s rights were severely limited by law. In their account of the events of 1776 and the Revolutionary War, the authors tell the story of James Armistead Lafayette, a Black American who served as a spy for America. They also note that “[w]omen formed their own resistance groups” and describe briefly two who served in battle.
The last page of text, opposite the inside of the back cover, sets out a “Message from Neil Gorsuch.” Here he recounts the nation’s history of combatting inequality, citing the women gathered in Seneca Falls in 1848 to demand equal rights, President Abraham Lincoln’s call “to abolish slavery” during the Civil War, and Dr. Martin Luther King’s “I have a Dream” speech in 1963. These campaigns for gender and racial equality explicitly invoked the Declaration of Independence.
Perhaps Gorsuch’s message will defuse criticism by those who argue that he should have said more about slavery in his book. (On the same page that Gorsuch and Nitze describe Thomas Jefferson’s role in writing the Declaration, they include a standalone description of his mockingbird, Jefferson’s “constant companion” who occasionally “would take food from his lips.” Surely, a critic could argue, the fact that Jefferson owned more than 100 slaves in 1776 warrants at least as much attention as his pet bird.)
One recurring theme throughout the book, which I’ll conclude with, is its display of compassion for those who sacrificed so much for the nation’s independence. Fairly or not, compassion is not always a term one associates with Gorsuch, who was grilled at his Supreme Court confirmation hearings for his dissent in the so-called “frozen trucker” case. In that case, as the Washington Post summarized, “Gorsuch ruled against Alphonse Maddin, a driver who claimed he was wrongly fired after ignoring a supervisor’s demands and leaving an unheated truck to seek safety in freezing temperatures.”
Compassion is a quality that may come to mind more readily with the other justice and children’s book author we’ll be looking at, Sonia Sotomayor. When President Barack Obama announced his nomination of Sotomayor to the Supreme Court, he praised her for having “a common touch and a sense of compassion; an understanding of how the world works and how ordinary people live.” Indeed, one point of contention at Sotomayor’s Supreme Court confirmation hearings was that she took compassion (or its close relative, empathy) too far, as reflected in her “wise Latina woman” comment to a group of law students in 2001. During that speech, Sotomayor said, “I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn't lived that life.”
Sotomayor had to clarify what she meant by that remark at the hearings, stating, “upfront, unequivocally and without doubt” that she did not “believe that any ethnic, racial or gender group has an advantage in sound judging.” At one point, Sotomayor said, the “words I chose, taking the rhetorical flourish, it was a bad idea.” Nevertheless, she has stood by her view that the legal system is enriched by a diversity of perspectives and experiences. And her embrace of diversity is apparent in Just Ask! Be Different, Be Brave, Be You, the third of her books aimed at younger readers, published in 2019.
The book begins with a letter to readers, in which Sotomayor explains that she was diagnosed with juvenile diabetes, which required her to give herself insulin shots. “Sometimes I felt different,” she writes, and she knew that other kids were curious about what she was doing but never asked her about it. As Sotomayor grew older, she writes, “I realized that there are many ways to be, that I was not alone in feeling different.” So, she wrote this book “to explain how differences make us stronger in a good way.”
And that Sotomayor does, in a 32-page book intended for students from preschool through third grade; Amazon’s customers concur, saying the reading age is between four and seven years. Just Ask! introduces us to several children who are disabled and poses a question to the reader on every other page. For example, we meet Manuel, who has attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder and explains that “[w]hen my teachers and friends are patient with me when I forget something or get distracted, I can get myself back on track.” On the next page, the book asks, “What’s helpful to you?”
With its embrace of difference and diversity, Just Ask! accords with Sotomayor’s judicial philosophy. This was embodied by her dissent in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, in which she decried the majority’s decision invalidating two universities’ race-based admissions policies for violating the 14th Amendment’s equal protection clause.
Sotomayor’s impassioned dissent concluded:
Notwithstanding this Court’s actions … society’s progress toward equality cannot be permanently halted. Diversity is now a fundamental American value, housed in our varied and multicultural American community that only continues to grow. The pursuit of racial diversity will go on. Although the Court has stripped out almost all uses of race in college admissions, universities can and should continue to use all available tools to meet society’s needs for diversity in education.
Gorsuch and Sotomayor come from different backgrounds, were appointed by presidents from different parties, and have disagreed on some of the most important and controversial issues before the Supreme Court. Their children’s books reflect their different life experiences and views. Gorsuch reveres the ideals of the founding while Sotomayor celebrates the value of diversity.
But that’s not the end of the story. These justices’ approaches, despite their differences, can be seen as complementary. Gorsuch’s message in Heroes is that “the torch passes to each new generation to defend the Declaration’s ideals and help make our Nation truer to them still.” Sotomayor’s Just Ask! shows just how different and diverse the generation is that will take on this challenge.
