Micah Quigley (J.D. ’21) will clerk for U.S. Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch during the October 2025–26 term. Courtesy of Micah Quigley.

Micah Quigley (J.D. ’21) will clerk for U.S. Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch during the October 2025–26 term. In an interview with the Maroon, he spoke about how his interests aligned with Gorsuch, his originalist legal philosophy, and how he grounds himself in the legal landscape.

Quigley is one of seven UChicago Law School graduates who will begin clerkships with Supreme Court Justices during the October 2025–26 term. He currently works as an associate attorney for Gibson Dunn and was previously a member of the University of Chicago Law Review.

Clerkships offer law school graduates the opportunity to work directly with a sitting judge or justice, assisting them with legal research, preparing for court proceedings, and drafting opinions and orders. Supreme Court clerkships are among the most prestigious opportunities available to early career lawyers—there are no more than 36 clerks at any given time—allowing them to participate in the United States’ most important legal proceedings and frequently opening the door to elite legal careers.

Although clerkships also provide lawyers with an opportunity to learn from a sitting judge or justice, Quigley, who previously completed clerkships with Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals Judge Andrew Oldham and D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals Judge Neomi Rao, does not believe that a clerk’s primary task is to learn.

“The role of a clerk is to be an agent of justice and help the justice ascertain what the law is,” he said. “I think there is no other agenda for a clerk… other than helping the justice.”

According to Quigley, a clerkship with Gorsuch aligns well with his interests and legal perspective. He identifies as an originalist—a legal philosophy favored by conservatives that aims to interpret the Constitution and other legal texts as would have been understood when they were written. More specifically, he sees himself as “an original law originalist.”

“[I] go back to the founding [and] figure out the valid law as of 1789. [It can contain] rules from previous English law, or rules that were created by the Constitution for the first time,” Quigley said. “[I] have to identify those rules, and then [I] have an obligation to follow those rules, except insofar as they’ve been validly changed over time.”

Quigley also adheres to the legal and philosophical theory of natural law, which he views as closely connected to originalism.

“Natural law is a certain way of looking at law that says that law and morality are connected,” he said. “Part of what natural law theory would say is that sovereigns in America, the people are the sovereign, [have] an obligation to create laws that will secure peace, allow people to flourish, and natural law requires a respect for the preexisting law that the sovereign created.”

Quigley sees both traditions present in Gorsuch’s jurisprudence and was happy to accept the clerkship offer from him because of their ideological alignment. “I would be honored to clerk for any justice. At the same time, I am particularly happy to be clerking for Justice Gorsuch, [who] has a fantastic writing style and follows the original law of the Constitution while faithfully interpreting the Constitution and statutes,” Quigley said.

Quigley highlighted Gorsuch’s concurring opinion in Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo as particularly noteworthy to him. In Loper Bright, the court overturned Chevron U.S.A. v. Natural Resources Defense Council, a 1984 case that established a standard of judicial deference to the reasonable interpretations of ambiguous statutes by administrative agencies—commonly known as Chevron deference.

“What was interesting is that Justice Gorsuch went through in detail and explained the different ways in which aspects of stare decisis doctrine can or cannot be justified by legal practice as it existed at the founding,” Quigley said.

He objects to the idea of viewing laws that were enacted in the past as outdated. Rather, he sees law as evolving from what people have decided in the past, and that proper understandings of the law are impossible to establish if we disregard the past.

“Any law is the dead hand of the past. Like the Civil Rights Act, the people who enacted it are probably all dead,” Quigley said. “Congress is not the same Congress that it was a few years ago, prior to the last election. If we’re not willing to bind ourselves to the past, then it’s not clear to me that we can do law at all.”

These beliefs are rooted in his undergraduate experience studying political science and philosophy at Grove City College. Although he initially didn’t intend to study law, Quigley thought that his undergraduate education prepared him for law school. “I realized that the skill set that I was starting to develop, and my proclivities, aligned pretty well with law school,” Quigley said.

His two undergraduate majors also heavily influenced his existing beliefs in law. Political science gave him a strong understanding of the origins of American law, and philosophy challenged him to come up with logical conclusions from existing conditions.

“The philosophical framework steered me toward the conclusion that legal questions can have objectively correct answers derived through legal means, and political philosophy [gave me] an understanding of the American founding and American political tradition… and also an understanding of classical natural law theory,” Quigley said. Although he’s currently unsure of what he plans on doing after the end of his clerkship with Gorsuch, he indicated that he may pursue legal academia or return to work at a law firm.

Quigley also emphasized the importance of spending time outside the law “bubble,” noting that both his upbringing and time away from legal circles have helped ground him in his work.

“I was not raised in sort of the elite bubble that one finds oneself in after going to UChicago or as a lawyer in D.C., and it’s sort of nice to have grown up around just ordinary Americans,” Quigley said. “They are more grounded in what’s actually important in life, like family, for instance, than one can sometimes become in D.C., where it’s tempting to be too focused on one’s career to the exclusion of other things.”