NEIL GORSUCH

NEIL GORSUCH

Gorsuch, 49, serves on the 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Denver, where he has made a name for himself as a facile writer. Gorsuch is a graduate of Columbia University and Harvard Law School, and served as a law clerk to Justices Anthony Kennedy and fellow Coloradan Byron White.

Gorsuch has written in favor of courts’ second-guessing government regulations, in defense of religious freedom and skeptically about law enforcement. He has contended that courts give too much deference to government agencies’ interpretations of statutes. He sided with two groups that mounted religious objections to the Obama administration’s requirements that employers provide health insurance that includes contraception for women.

THOMAS HARDIMAN

Hardiman, 51, works in Pittsburgh as a judge on the Philadelphia-based 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. He drove a taxi to support himself during his undergraduate years at the University of Notre Dame. He received his law degree from Georgetown University.

The Senate confirmed him 95-0 to his current job in April 2007. His prominent opinions on the appeals court include siding with jails seeking to strip search inmates arrested for even minor offenses and backing the collection of genetic evidence from people at the time of their arrest. Hardiman has supported gun rights, dissenting in a 2013 case that upheld a New Jersey law to strengthen requirements to carry a handgun in public.

WILLIAM PRYOR

Pryor, 54, has his office in Birmingham, Ala., where his sits as a judge on the Atlanta-based 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. He’s been on the court since 2004, when Bush gave him a temporary recess appointment to get around Democratic opposition in the Senate. He was confirmed by a 53-45 vote in 2005, part of a bipartisan deal to limit Senate delays of appellate nominations.

Pryor has a reputation as a staunch conservative. He once called the 1973 landmark Roe v. Wade decision legalizing abortion the “worst abomination in the history of constitutional law.” On the bench, Pryor has often ruled against criminal defendants. He authored a majority opinion upholding a border-patrol agent’s decision to stop a SUV filled with Hispanic passengers because the vehicle was driving erratically and the occupants appeared nervous. He also ruled that a Supreme Court decision banning automatic life sentences for juvenile defendants should not be applied to older cases. The high court later disagreed.