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Long before Neil Gorsuch was a Supreme Court justice casting pivotal votes in society-quaking decisions on everything from voting rights to affirmative action to abortion, he was that friendly “debate you” dweeb everyone tried to avoid in the college dorm. You know that guy? The one who seemed to lurk in the common area, waiting for anyone to come along so he could make a right-wing argument based on his own highly technical notion of what the rules are, no matter how ridiculous the result?

Gorsuch would engage on any topic, but his favorite was abortion. According to his college freshman floormate Liz Pleshette, he was the guy who would argue that a pregnant 12-year-old who had been raped needed to carry the pregnancy to term, without any consideration for the reality of the situation, because “abortion is murder, Liz.” There’s a certain kind of guy who loves to debate abortion with liberal women, and Gorsuch fit the mold perfectly. When I spoke to her, Pleshette remembered that she would get upset from these interactions but he wouldn’t. “Even if he was vehemently arguing with you, it was laced with such civility and tight manners and politeness that you could be fooled into thinking that this is someone who is coming to the venture with loads of respect,” Pleshette told me.

When President Donald Trump nominated Gorsuch to the high court in 2017, even my Slate colleagues were taken in by this nice-guy act. In an episode of our podcast Amicus produced right after Gorsuch’s nomination, Mark Joseph Stern, Dahlia Lithwick, and Jeremy Stahl described him as a thoughtful jurist. All three agreed that Gorsuch was decidedly “not Lucifer,” as some progressives had painted him. As Stern put it at the time: “I think he’s a principled judge. I think he’s very conservative, but I don’t think he’s a rank partisan, like, for instance, Justice Alito.”

A decade later, this is a guy who has gutted the Voting Rights Act, ended affirmative action, and dismantled the constitutional right to reproductive care. He has written opinions that embrace outright falsehoods in the interest of letting a high school football coach force prayer in a public school. He has cleared the way for people to legally put up signs saying they will not serve gay people. He has ended up as one of the most consistently conservative justices on a very conservative court.

How does Gorsuch manage to do all of this without provoking the ire that some of his fellow right-wing justices receive? I think it’s mostly because no one knows who he is. He’s arguably the most anonymous member of the bench. “I would be shocked if a majority of Americans could identify him or even name him,” Stern told me. This conforms with polling, which estimates his name recognition at 6 percent.

Given all that Gorsuch has managed to do under that same guise of right-minded gentility from his college days, we ought to know who he is. Which is why today Slate is launching a new season of Slow Burn, Becoming Justice Gorsuch, exploring his life, judicial temperament, and character. He isn’t unknowable at all—and it’s crucial to understand what led up to his greater project on the Supreme Court.

Becoming Justice Gorsuch starts here. Episode 1 of the new Slow Burn season is out now. Slate Plus members get the whole season today.

No case illustrates the dangers of Gorsuch’s form of judging—and the possible corrective to the Gorsuch method—like the most famous one he heard as an appeals court judge, before he even became a Supreme Court justice. That story, which has come to be known as the “frozen trucker” case, illustrates how the tweedy, polite geek can take the rules and apply them in a way that is pedantic to the point of absurdity, to all of our detriment.

The case began in 2009, when a trucker named Alphonse Maddin had........

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