Neil Gorsuch Sold Property to Head of a Major Law Firm
A search of the Supreme Court docket on the legal research site Nexis returned more than four dozen cases involving lawyers from the firm from when Justice Gorsuch was appointed to the end of 2022, the latest date in the database. They included cases the court took up, petitions in which it declined to hear an appeal, and friend-of-the-court briefs submitted in cases in which the firm did not represent a litigant.
Mr. Duffy, who lives in Colorado, did not respond to an email from The New York Times. But he told Politico that he bought the property because he is a fly fisherman and that he has never argued before Justice Gorsuch or met him socially. He also said he did not know that the jurist had a stake in the property when he made his first offer.
It is not clear when that offer was made. The New York Times described the justice’s ownership in the property in a March 2017 article that detailed his ties to the billionaire Philip F. Anschutz.
Mr. Anschutz, a major conservative donor, lobbied Colorado’s lone Republican senator and the George W. Bush administration to nominate Mr. Gorsuch to an appeals court seat in 2006. The 40-acre property that Mr. Duffy eventually bought was another link between the jurist and the mogul.
In 2005, Justice Gorsuch had joined with two top lieutenants to Mr. Anschutz to form a limited liability company to acquire the land.
Calling themselves the Walden Group, they bought the property for $900,000, property records show, and built a 2,923-square-foot log house for fishing vacations. It included 2,000 feet on both sides of the Colorado River. The venture was structured as a time share, giving each partner a right to use it a certain number of days.
In 2017, a spokeswoman for Justice Gorsuch told The Times that he had contributed $360,000 to the Walden Group, giving him a 20 percent stake; the two lieutenants of Mr. Anschutz each contributed twice as much and owned 40 percent.
Source: The New York Times
