Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch warned that an explosion in federal laws is so onerous that now ordinary Americans are at risk of having their lives upended by a hellish legal nightmare.
The Trump appointee is out with a new book titled “Over Ruled: The Human Toll of Too Much Law,” in which he and co-author Janie Nitze tell the stories of people who were unaware that they had violated some obscure law and suddenly found themselves sucked into the uncompromising machine of the federal legal system.
In the book, the conservative justice reflects on his career on the federal bench and “that I had seen many — so many — cases where the sheer volume and complexity of our laws had swallowed up ordinary people.”
Gorsuch writes that while “some law is essential to our lives and our freedoms,” that “too much law” can put those same freedoms “at risk and even undermine respect for law itself.”
(Video: Fox News)
“I had a case on the 10th Circuit where a middle schooler erupted in a series of burps in class to entertain his classmates,” Gorsuch recalled during an appearance on “Fox & Friends” earlier this week. “And rather than just going to the principal’s office or having his parents called, he was arrested, handcuffed, and those are the kinds of things you just have to ask yourself, could we be handling this differently?”
He also spoke of the massive number of laws that have been implemented, another example of an administrative state-run amok.
“It used to be the whole federal code could fit into a single volume, today it fills up an entire wall in my office,” he told host Ainsley Earhardt. “We have more than doubled the number of crimes on the books in my lifetime. There are so many crimes in the federal regulatory provisions that nobody knows how many there are. It would take years just to read them aloud. There are hundreds and hundreds of thousands.”
“As a judge, my job is to apply the law … The best I can do is share with you what I have seen from my unusual vantage in our legal system,” Gorsuch writes in his book.
He said “we now have so many federal criminal laws covering so many things that one scholar suggests that ‘there is no one in the United States over the age of 18 who cannot be indicted for some federal crime.’”
Published on August 6, “Overruled” has rocketed up the charts and is currently a number one best seller on Amazon.
“America has always been a nation of laws. But today our laws have grown so vast and reach so deeply into our lives that it’s worth asking: In our reverence for law, have we gone too far?” reads the book’s description. “Over just the last few decades, laws in this nation have exploded in number; they are increasingly complex; and the punishments they carry are increasingly severe. Some of these laws come from our elected representatives, but many now come from agency officials largely insulated from democratic accountability.?”
“There were just so many cases that came to me in which I saw ordinary Americans, just everyday, regular people trying to go about their lives, not trying to hurt anybody or do anything wrong and just getting whacked, unexpectedly, by some legal rule they didn’t know about,” Gorsuch said.
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