WASHINGTON (CN) - President Donald Trump campaigned on the promise that he would fill the vacant ninth seat on the U.S. Supreme Court with someone who would follow in the steps of the late Justice Antonin Scalia.
The messaged worked, with 27 percent of Trump voters saying Supreme Court appointments were the most important factor in their decision to vote for him, according to NBC News exit polls. Looking at the judge tapped Tuesday from the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals to fill the job, many believe Trump kept his promise to voters.
"Overall it's as if Scalia lived and got 30 years younger," Mark Graber, a professor at the University of Maryland Carey School of Law, said of the nominee in an interview.
U.S. Circuit Judge Neil Gorsuch is similar to Scalia in a number of ways. He shares the conservative icon's alma mater and textualist legal philosophy, while writing with a lively, accessible writing style that echoes Scalia's famous opinions.
Legal experts predict generally that Gorsuch, should he survive a contentious approval battle in the Senate, will likely not change the court much from what it looked like before Scalia's death.
There are particular areas of the law, however, on which he could have a profound impact.
Most notable, if not most exciting, is how Gorsuch feels about the court's role in weighing in on ambiguity in administrative law. While Scalia favored a judicial doctrine known as Chevron deference, which lets administrative agencies interpret their own ambiguous statutes so long as their interpretation is reasonable, Gorsuch has been critical.
In a concurring opinion he wrote to the case Gutierrez-Brizuela v. Lynch last year, Gorsuch wondered whether it was time to "face the behemoth" of the Chevron deference.
"Perhaps allowing agencies rather than courts to declare the law's meaning bears some advantages, but it also bears its costs," Gorsuch wrote in August. "And the founders were ware of those costs, knowing that, when unchecked by independent courts exercising the job of declaring the law's meaning, executives throughout history had sought to exploit ambiguous laws as license for their own prerogative."
While that may seem like a small potential change, Chevron deference comes down to how much power is vested in the executive branch. With Gorsuch being skeptical of the doctrine, it could mean the court gives less space for executive agencies to interpret their statutes.
"We've had a lot of those cases under the last administration and the one before that," Duke University law professor Ernest Young said in an interview. "I think we're going to have a lot more in this one, so even though Chevron is kind of a nerdy doctrine, it's kind of important."