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Wednesday, March 19, 2025

The Mystery of Neil Gorsuch

Andrew Koppelman

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.

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