Washington — Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch in “Over Ruled: The Human Toll of Too Much Law” throws the book at the law, telling the story of what he sees as a nation at risk from an explosion of new laws.
Gorsuch, who was nominated for the high court by former President Donald Trump and took the bench in 2017, wrote in his new book that law in America has swallowed up ordinary people, though he said it’s done so “with the best of intentions.”
“I’ve been a judge now for about 18 years,” Gorsuch said in an interview at the Supreme Court. “And I just saw so many cases where ordinary Americans — decent, hard working Americans — were just trying to make their way in life. They weren’t trying to hurt anybody, and yet they were caught up in the legal system in ways they couldn’t hardly affect.”
Gorsuch said his is a “book of stories” about the cases he and others have seen — from fishermen in Florida, to monks in Louisiana and a magician in Missouri.
“Their experiences in a world where law has really exploded — just in our lifetimes,” Gorsuch said.
The stories are “emblematic of a world in which we just have so much law,” Gorsuch said. He noted that federal crimes have nearly doubled in his lifetime, saying “nobody knows how many federal crimes there are because it would take years just to read them.”
“We have more people serving life sentences today than we had serving any sentence in 1970 or thereabouts,” he added. “So that’s the world we live in.”
The justice posited that a lack of trust in a polarized political environment where some view the other party as “evil” has made Americans “unable to speak to one another and listen to one another.”
But in a recent AP-NORC poll, 70% of Americans suggest the Supreme Court itself contributes to that problem — deciding cases on ideology, rather than being fair and impartial. On that sentiment, Gorsuch disagrees, citing the frequency with which he sides with the liberal justices in cases, rather than the conservative majority.
“That’s the court I know,” he said.
Critics of the Supreme Court’s conservative majority have been especially vocal since the justices rolled back a constitutional right to abortion in a 2022 decision that returned much of the fight over abortion rights to the individual states. Those same critics also point to a decision that ended affirmative action in college admissions.
Gorsuch said those issues represent “deeply complex legal questions” on which people can — and do — disagree. On abortion and affirmative action, Gorsuch believes the court put the issues back in the people’s hands.
“In a democracy, you’re in the driver’s seat, you’re the sovereign,” he added. “Do you really want me deciding everything for you?”
Adding to the scrutiny of the Supreme Court, President Biden last month unveiled a trio of proposals to reform the high court, calling on Congress to pass legislation setting 18-year term limits for justices and establish binding, enforceable ethics rules for the justices.
Gorsuch noted that the justices adopted an ethics code this term, calling it a “significant step” and “remarkable that we were able to agree unanimously.”
On the question of whether the court must care about public perception, Gorsuch pondered the place for unelected judges in a democracy.
“An independent judiciary — our founders fought a revolution for it, because they knew what it was like to have a judiciary that was responsive to the crown, to a whimsical king, and they didn’t want that for this country,” he said. “And the truth is, when you’re the man in the dock, you don’t want it either.”
