According to Adam Liptak, the newbie on the Supreme Court has been acting like the boss of everyone.

New justices usually take years to find their footing at the Supreme Court. For Justice Neil M. Gorsuch, who joined the court in April, a couple of months seem to have sufficed.

His early opinions were remarkably self-assured. He tangled with his new colleagues, lectured them on the role of the institution he had just joined, and made broad jurisprudential pronouncements in minor cases.

In other words (if all that is accurate), he’s being strikingly annoying. Nobody likes being lectured to by the newbie.

Liptak says justices normally take years to feel as if they’re fully up to speed.

“I was frightened to death for the first three years,” Justice Stephen G. Breyer, who joined the court in 1994, said in a 2006 interview.

Justice Clarence Thomas, who joined the court in 1991, said he had asked his new colleagues how long it would take to hit his stride. “To a person, they said it took three to five years under normal circumstances to adjust to the court,” Justice Thomas said in 1996. His own circumstances, he added, referring to his bruising confirmation hearings, pushed him toward “the outer limits of that period.”

Estimates have not changed over time. “So extraordinary an intellect as Brandeis said it took him four or five years to feel that he understood the jurisprudential problems of the court,” Justice Felix Frankfurter wrote of Justice Louis D. Brandeis, who sat on the court from 1916 to 1939.

Justice Robert H. Jackson rejected Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes’s estimate of three years to “get acclimated,” saying it was “nearer to five.”

But Gorsuch thinks he’s there already, in Liptak’s account.

“If a statute needs repair,” Justice Gorsuch wrote, “there’s a constitutionally prescribed way to do it. It’s called legislation. To be sure, the demands of bicameralism and presentment are real, and the process can be protracted. But the difficulty of making new laws isn’t some bug in the constitutional design: It’s the point of the design, the better to preserve liberty.”

“Congress already wrote a perfectly good law,” he wrote. “I would follow it.”

Commentators wondered whether that vivid writing was a proportional response in a decidedly minor dispute.

“Dude, pick your spots,” Daniel Epps, a law professor at Washington University in St. Louis, said on First Mondays, an entertaining podcast that explores developments at the Supreme Court. “You don’t need to pull out all this stuff in every statutory case.”

So not just Liptak then.

In a concurring opinion in Maslenjak v. United States, a case about when naturalized citizens may be stripped of their citizenship, Justice Gorsuch said Justice Kagan, writing for the majority, had provided more guidance than was warranted and proper.

The Supreme Court should announce general principles, he said, and let lower courts fill in the gaps.

Justice Kagan, writing for six members, responded that she had a different conception of the Supreme Court’s role. “Such a halfway decision would fail to fulfill our responsibility to both parties and courts,” she wrote, adding that one federal appeals court had already called the Supreme Court’s failure to provide clear guidance on the subject “maddening.”

Justice Gorsuch, who is 49, concluded his opinion with a nice aphorism of the sort that some justices might have waited decades to deploy.

“This court,” he wrote, “often speaks most wisely when it speaks last.”

Yep, he definitely sounds annoying.