Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch is Worried About The Explosion of Laws in America

The book is called “Over Ruled: The Human Toll of Too Much Law” and was co-written by Janie Nitze. The authors hope to shed light on the sheer volume of cases being passed through courts right now and how they are affecting the lives and freedoms of everyday people.

He is also an accomplished lawyer, holding degrees from Oxford and Harvard Law School. Gorsuch is a proponent of constitutional originalism, which means that he interprets laws and cases while always remembering the Constitution’s original meaning.

However, he also notes that “too much law” can put undue restrictions on freedoms “risk and even undermine respect for law itself.”

The book contains a selection of real stories of people who have gotten caught living their lives and going about their business in the rotten business of “too much law.” Gorsuch says that there are a group of people who have had their lives ruined because of “our multitude of statutes, rules, regulations, orders, edicts and decrees.”

Gorsuch also thinks that there is “not much” a person in his position can do. Even for a Supreme Court Justice to overturn a law, there would need to be a lawsuit brought before them and ample legal evidence to use.

However, the authors do not go into detail about how they would like to dismantle this unofficial two-tiered system.

It begs the question, are they suggesting that completely mundane everyday tasks have become illegal? Or does the legal system not account only for crime?

The examples that he uses serve to highlight some ridiculous and unbelievable examples of some laws still on the books.

Gorsuch uses the example of a federal crime on the books that seems completely ridiculous: selling a mattress without a warning label.

The law has enshrined certain rules that protect businesses. For example, if a person hurts themselves on a mattress, the warning label protects the maker or seller of the mattress from being legally responsible for misuse of the item.

He says that during the COVID-19 pandemic, “the federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration … asserted the authority to issue a mandate requiring some 84 million Americans to mask and test at their own expense or take newly developed vaccines rushed to market in something called Operation Warp Speed.”

In moving forward, he says that there should be “a rule of law designed to ensure fair notice, equal treatment, and room for individual flourishing” — and asserts that he would “never bet against the American people.”