Americans ‘are oppressed’ by too many laws and regulations, Judge Gorsuch says in new book

By Mark Sherman, The Associated Press

WASHINGTON — Ordinary Americans are “burdened” with too many laws and regulations, Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch says in a new book that highlights his skepticism of federal agencies and the power they exercise.

“Too little law and we’re not safe and our liberties are not protected,” Gorsuch told The Associated Press in an interview at his Supreme Court office. “But too much law and you actually weaken those same things.”

“Over Ruled: The Human Toll of Too Much Law” will be published Tuesday by Harper, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers. Gorsuch received a $500,000 advance for the book, according to his annual financial reports.

In the interview, Gorsuch declined to be drawn into discussions about term limits or an enforceable ethics code for judges, which President Joe Biden recently proposed at a time of diminished public confidence in the court. Justice Elena Kagan, speaking days before Biden, separately said the court’s ethics code, adopted by the justices last November, should have some form of enforcement.

But Gorsuch spoke about the importance of judicial independence. “I’m not saying there aren’t ways to improve what we have. I’m just saying we’ve got something very special. It’s the envy of the world, the envy of the United States judiciary,” he said.

The 56-year-old justice was the first of then-President Donald Trump’s three Supreme Court nominees, who joined forces to solidify a conservative majority that overturned Roe v. Wade, ended affirmative action in college admissions, expanded gun rights and curbed environmental regulations aimed at combating climate change as well as air and water pollution more broadly.

A month ago, the Supreme Court ended a term in which Gorsuch and five other conservative justices on the court delivered sharp rebukes of the administrative state in three important cases, including a decision that overturned a 40-year-old Chevron decision that made it more likely that courts would uphold regulation. The court’s three liberal justices dissented in each case.

Gorsuch was also in the majority ruling that former presidents have broad immunity from criminal prosecution in a decision that indefinitely delayed the election interference case against Trump. In addition, the justices made it harder to use a federal obstruction charge against people who were part of the mob that violently stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, to overturn Trump’s loss to Biden in the 2020 election.

Gorsuch defended the immunity ruling, saying it was necessary to prevent presidents from being limited in their office by threats of prosecution after they leave office.

The court was faced with an unprecedented situation, he said. “This is the first time in our history that we have one presidential administration bringing criminal charges against a previous president. That’s a serious question, isn’t it? Serious implications,” Gorsuch said.

But in the book, co-authored by former law clerk Janie Nitze, Gorusch largely sidesteps these big issues and focuses on a fisherman, a magician, an Amish farmer, an immigrant, a braider and others who risked prison, hefty fines, deportation and other hardships because of unyielding principles.

In his 18 years as a judge, including the last seven on the Supreme Court, Gorsuch said, “There have been so many cases where I’ve seen ordinary Americans, just ordinary people, trying to live their lives, not trying to hurt anyone or do anything wrong, and they just get hit unexpectedly by some rule of law that they didn’t know about.”

The problem, he said, is that there has been an explosion of legislation and regulation, both at the federal and state levels. The sheer volume of congressional work over the past decade has been overwhelming, he said, an average of 344 pieces of legislation, totaling 2 million to 3 million words a year.

One of the vignettes is about John Yates, a Florida fisherman who was convicted of getting rid of an undersized groper under a federal law originally aimed at the accounting industry and destroying evidence in the Enron scandal. Yates’ case went all the way to the Supreme Court, where he won by one vote.

“I wanted to tell the stories of people whose lives were touched,” Gorsuch said.

The book expands on a thread that has run through Gorsuch’s opinions over the years, from his criticism of the Chevron decision while on the federal appeals court in Denver to a May 2023 statement in which he called the extraordinary measures taken during the COVID-19 crisis, which has claimed the lives of more than a million Americans, perhaps “the greatest violations of civil liberties in the history of peace in this country.”

While Gorsuch has voted with other conservative justices in most of the court’s major cases, he has also sided with liberals in important cases, including one in which he wrote an opinion in 2020 that extended workplace discrimination protections to LGBTQ people. Gorsuch has also sided with liberal justices in all of the court’s cases involving Native Americans since he joined the court.

Another area where he tended to diverge from his conservative colleagues was on immigration, especially when deportation opponents complained they had not been given sufficient notice of the hearings.

Gorsuch recently returned from a summer teaching assignment in Porto, Portugal, at George Mason University Law School. Last year, he spent two weeks in Lisbon, Portugal, as part of the same program, for which he received nearly $30,000, plus food, lodging and travel.

Later this week, he will travel to the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in Simi Valley, California, to talk about the new book.

He said that the day he met with the AP, he wore a tie for the first time in weeks. He wore a dark blue suit, cowboy boots and a Western belt.

He seemed calm, offering guests chocolate chip cookies and coffee and joking with a reporter who was talking about his upcoming trip to the New Jersey shore. “Go out there and wave your flags,” Gorsuch said, referring to the controversy over flags like those flown by rioters on Jan. 6 at the homes of Justice Samuel Alito and his wife.

Gorsuch isn’t the only judge with a book coming out this summer. Judge Ketanja Brown Jackson’s memoir, “Lovely One,” is set to be released next month.