Judge Neil Gorsuch, President Trump's nominee for the U.S. Supreme Court, has developed a reputation for being a very skilled writer during his time on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit. Gorsuch displayed this talent last year, when he disagreed with a ruling in favor of an officer who arrested and sent to juvenile detention a 13 year-old boy for disrupting a gym class with burping. His hilarious dissent began:
If a seventh grader starts trading fake burps for laughs in gym class, what's a teacher to do? Order extra laps? Detention? A trip to the principal's office? Maybe. But then again, maybe that's too old school. Maybe today you call a police officer. And maybe today the officer decides that, instead of just escorting the now compliant thirteen year old to the principal's office, an arrest would be a better idea. So out come the handcuffs and off goes the child to juvenile detention. My colleagues suggest the law permits exactly this option and they offer ninety-four pages explaining why they think that's so. Respectfully, I remain unpersuaded.