WASHINGTON (AP) — Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch wrote in a new book that ordinary Americans are “bruised” by too many laws and regulations, underscoring his skepticism of federal agencies and their power.
“Too few laws make us less safe and our freedoms less protected,” Gorsuch told The Associated Press in an interview in his Supreme Court office. “But too many laws actually undermine those same things.”
“Over Ruled: The Human Toll of Too Much Law” will be published Tuesday by HarperCollins imprint Harper. Gorsuch received a $500,000 advance for the book, according to his annual financial disclosure report.
In the interview, Gorsuch refused to be drawn into a debate over term limits for justices or an enforceable ethics code, recently proposed by President Joe Biden at a time when public confidence in the Supreme Court is declining. Speaking just days before Biden’s remarks, Justice Elena Kagan separately said the Supreme Court’s ethics code, adopted by the justices last November, needs enforcement.
But Gorsuch spoke of the importance of judicial independence. “I’m not saying there aren’t ways to improve the status quo, I’m just saying we’ve been given something very special. The American judiciary is the envy of the world,” he said.
The 56-year-old justice was the first of three Supreme Court justices appointed by then-President Donald Trump, who worked together to establish a conservative majority that overturned Roe v. Wade, ended affirmative action in college admissions, expanded gun rights and generally relaxed environmental regulations addressing climate change, air and water pollution.
The Supreme Court ended a session a month ago in which Justice Gorsuch and five other conservative justices issued scathing rebukes of the administrative state in three major cases, including overturning the 40-year-old Chevron decision that made the court more likely to uphold regulation. The court’s three liberal justices dissented in each case.
Gorsuch was also part of the majority that ruled that the former president has broad immunity from criminal prosecution in a ruling that indefinitely postponed the election interference lawsuit against Trump. The justices also made it harder to apply federal obstruction charges against people who were part of the mob that violently stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, in an attempt to overturn Trump’s loss to Biden in the 2020 election.
The story continues
Gorsuch argued that immunity is necessary to prevent a president from being hampered in office by the threat of prosecution after he leaves office.
He said the Supreme Court had to grapple with an unprecedented situation. “For the first time in the history of our nation, a presidential administration is bringing criminal charges against a former president. This is a big deal, right? It has big implications,” Gorsuch said.
But in this book, co-written with former law clerk Janie Nitze, Gorsch largely sets those big issues aside and shifts his focus to the people — fishermen, magicians, Amish farmers, immigrants, hair braiders — who have suffered imprisonment, heavy fines, and deportation because of the rigid rules.
Gorsuch said that during his 18 years on the Supreme Court, including the past seven years as a justice, “so many of the cases I’ve presided over have involved ordinary Americans – ordinary people just going about their daily lives – not trying to hurt anyone or do anything wrong, but suddenly being hit by a provision of the law that they didn’t know about.”
The problem, he said, is an explosion of laws and regulations at both the federal and state levels. The volume of bills in Congress over the past decade has been massive, averaging 344 bills per year, totaling 2 million to 3 million words, he said.
One story involves Florida fisherman John Yates, who was convicted of culling small grouper under a federal law originally aimed at destroying evidence in the accounting industry and Enron scandals. 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 affected,” Gorsuch said.
The book expands on a consistent theme found in Gorsuch’s opinions over the years, from his criticism of the Chevron decision while a federal appeals court judge in Denver to a May 2023 statement in which he called emergency measures taken during the COVID-19 crisis that has claimed more than 1 million American lives “perhaps the greatest civil rights violation in the peacetime history of this nation.”
While Justice Gorsuch has been sided with the other conservative justices in most of the Supreme Court’s major cases, he has also been sided with the liberal justices in notable cases, such as a 2020 decision that extended workplace discrimination protections to LGBTQ people. Justice Gorsuch has also been sided with the liberal justices in every case involving Native Americans since joining the Supreme Court.
Immigration, particularly where deportation opponents have complained they received insufficient notice of hearings, is another area where Trump is at odds with his conservative colleagues.
Gorsuch recently returned from serving as a summer instructor at George Mason University Law School in Porto, Portugal, and participated in the same program in Lisbon, Portugal, for two weeks last year, for which he was paid nearly $30,000, plus food, lodging and travel expenses.
He will visit the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in Simi Valley, California, later this week to speak about his new book.
He said the day he met with The Associated Press was the first time he had worn a tie in weeks. He wore a dark blue suit, cowboy boots and a Western-style belt.
Justice Gorsuch appeared at home, serving visitors chocolate chip cookies and coffee and joking with a reporter about a recent trip to the New Jersey coast. “Put that flag up there,” he said, referring to the controversy over a flag similar to the one hoisted by the Jan. 6 rioters at the home owned by Justice Samuel Alito and his wife.
Gorsuch isn’t the only justice releasing a book this summer. Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson’s memoir, “Lovely One,” will be released next month.
