The Law as Justice Gorsuch Sees It

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During his Supreme Court confirmation hearing, in March 2017, Neil Gorsuch laid out his views on what makes for a “good” judge. “My personal views,” he said, “belong over here,” and he gestured to his right. “I leave those at home.”

But of course he does have personal views—ones that are quite deeply felt. In a new book, Over Ruled: The Human Toll of Too Much Law, co-written with the legal scholar Janie Nitze, now-Justice Gorsuch describes what he sees as a pervasive and destructive overreach of federal law, which, he says, ensnares far too many Americans in a capricious and complex web.

[Neil Gorsuch and Janie Nitze: America has too many laws]

I spoke with Gorsuch by phone last week to ask him why he thinks America has “too much law,” and whether there’s any way to fix that problem without creating worse ones. The transcription of our conversation below has been edited for length and clarity.

Rebecca J. Rosen: What was your core purpose in writing this book?

Justice Neil Gorsuch: I’ve been a judge for a good spell now, and over time I kept seeing cases in which ordinary, decent, hardworking Americans who were just trying to do the right thing found themselves caught up in a legal maze, and in ways that they couldn’t reasonably have expected. And I wanted to learn more about why that was the case, where it came from, and to explore some of the stories behind the cases I see, whether it’s fishermen in Florida, monks in Louisiana, a magician in Missouri. I wanted to explore the human stories behind these cases.

What I found was that, simply put, law has exploded in just my lifetime. And of course, law is vital to keeping us free and to our aspirations for equal treatment of all persons. But it also contains an irony—too much law can threaten those very same ideals and aspirations. James Madison wrote about this 200 years ago, and the need to find a golden mean between