The Mystery of Neil Gorsuch
In his new book Over Ruled: The Human Toll of Too Much Law, Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch makes an important and valuable point: in recent decades, we have vastly increased the number of laws in the United States, producing such complexity that even lawyers are sometimes unable to tell what the law is. Unfortunately, his book is persistently distorted by minimal-state fantasies that are likely to hurt the people he most wants to help. And he sometimes misrepresents the facts of the stories he tells. Both of these pathologies also infect his judicial opinions. The principal virtue of the book is the light it unintentionally sheds on some of the Supreme Court’s least defensible decisions.I review the book in the Los Angeles Review of Books.
In his new book Over Ruled: The Human Toll of Too Much Law, Supreme Court
Justice Neil Gorsuch makes an important and valuable point: in recent decades,
we have vastly increased the number of laws in the United States, producing
such complexity that even lawyers are sometimes unable to tell what the law is.
Unfortunately, his book is persistently distorted by minimal-state fantasies
that are likely to hurt the people he most wants to help. And he sometimes
misrepresents the facts of the stories he tells. Both of these pathologies also
infect his judicial opinions. The principal virtue of the book is the light it
unintentionally sheds on some of the Supreme Court’s least defensible
decisions.
I review the book in the Los Angeles Review of Books.
