Over Ruled Quotes

“America remains the greatest beacon of liberty the world has ever known. The ideals embodied in our Declaration of Independence—that each of us enjoys certain inalienable rights, that all of us are created equal, that governments derive their just power from the consent of the governed—have inspired billions of people around the world and captured truths that resonate in every human heart. I would never bet against the American people. —NMG”
― Neil Gorsuch, Over Ruled: The Human Toll of Too Much Law

“The year after he was expelled from the Soviet Union, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn gave an address in the United States in which he warned that while the rise of an authoritarian state may seem unthinkable here, “It can happen. It is possible. As a Russian proverb says: ‘When it happens to you, you’ll know it’s true.’”1”
― Neil Gorsuch, Over Ruled: The Human Toll of Too Much Law

“Washington’s famous Rules of Civility and Decent Behavior in Company and Conversation may have begun with society niceties: don’t roll your eyes, don’t lift an eyebrow, don’t spit in another’s face. But they did not end there. Tellingly, they finished with a call to “labour to keep alive in your breast that little spark of celestial fire called conscience.”143”
― Neil Gorsuch, Over Ruled: The Human Toll of Too Much Law

“A few years later, in 1947, then Congressman John F. Kennedy offered a memorable speech at an event in Mineola, New York: “The fires of liberty were not self-starting,” he told the gathered crowd, “nor are they self-perpetuating. . . . To safeguard the fires we must be aware of the fuel necessary for their continued burning. Such fuel is the recognition by each American of the extreme importance of our government and how it works.” He finished by urging those “gathered here today [to] reaffirm our faith in American liberty by pledging ourselves to a more studied and conscientious awareness of government and the men who govern us.”74”
― Neil Gorsuch, Over Ruled: The Human Toll of Too Much Law

“And remember those teams of libertarian, progressive, and conservative legal scholars the center assembled to draft their ideal constitutions for the twenty-first century? Not only did all three groups wind up producing documents that hew closely to our existing charter’s central insights. Remarkably, after a week of dialogue, they even managed to reach consensus on five proposed amendments to our Constitution. No less remarkably, each of their proposed amendments sought to build on Madison’s central insight that liberty’s best protection lies in pitting power against power. As Jeffrey Rosen and Sal Khan explained, “All three teams shared concerns about an imperial presidency and a runaway administrative state.” They continued: “What unites all five amendments is a focus on the structures of government rather than individual rights. By preventing all power from being concentrated in one place, all are designed to ensure that each of the three branches can check the others or that all three branches are ultimately responsible to the people.”127”
― Neil Gorsuch, Over Ruled: The Human Toll of Too Much Law

“Through it all, at least one more thing became clear: fear and the desire for safety are powerful forces. They can lead to a clamor for action—almost any action—as long as someone does something to address a perceived threat. A leader or expert who claims he can fix everything if only we do exactly as he says can prove an irresistible force. We do not need to confront a bayonet; we need only a nudge before we willingly abandon the right to govern ourselves through our elected representatives and accept rule by decree. Along the way, we will accede to the loss of many cherished civil liberties—including the right to leave our homes and live, play, laugh, and grieve with one another. We may even cheer on those who ask us to forfeit our personal freedoms. It’s not a new story, of course. In the twentieth century, Europeans abdicated their liberties to strongmen. Even the ancients warned that democracies can degenerate into autocracies in the face of fear.”
― Neil Gorsuch, Over Ruled: The Human Toll of Too Much Law

“Making matters worse, Wilson believed, was the fact that the right to vote was being extended to more and more Americans. Maybe the propertied men of the founding era could be trusted, but now? As he put it: To know the public mind of this country, one must know the mind, not of Americans of the older stocks only, but also of Irishmen, of Germans, of negroes. In order to get a footing for new doctrine, one must influence minds cast in every mould of race, minds inheriting every bias of environment, warped by the histories of a score of different nations, warmed or chilled, closed or expanded by almost every climate of the globe.168 Wilson’s views on this topic weren’t confined to a single article; they suffused his writings.169 In his diary, for example, he complained that “universal suffrage is at the foundation of every evil in this country.”170 And over the course of his career, he opposed female suffrage, supported Jim Crow laws, and tolerated segregation by his cabinet secretaries in their departments.171”
― Neil Gorsuch, Over Ruled: The Human Toll of Too Much Law

“Wilson acknowledged the problem but surmised that if the members of the Constitutional Convention could be reunited in his day, they would be “the first to admit that the only fruit of dividing power had been to make it irresponsible.”166 “For Wilson,” as Professor Ronald J. Pestritto has explained, “the separation of powers, and all of the other institutional remedies that the founders employed against the danger of faction, stood in the way of government’s exercising its power in accord with the dictates of progress.”167”
― Neil Gorsuch, Over Ruled: The Human Toll of Too Much Law

“Nor, as the ABA committee warned in an earlier work, should we “have some 73 . . . courts in Washington, most of them exercising legislative and executive as well as judicial powers. A man should not be judge in his own case and the combination of prosecutor and judge in these tribunals must be relentlessly exposed and combated.”115”
― Neil Gorsuch, Over Ruled: The Human Toll of Too Much Law

“In 1938, a committee of the American Bar Association (ABA) chaired by Roscoe Pound, a former dean of Harvard Law School, issued an influential report.111 The report cautioned that “the idea of checks and balances is inseparable from a well ordered society” and that “it is a mistake to think it an obsolete idea of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries . . . something belonging only to a past era of small simple things.”112 Observing what was then transpiring in Europe, the report quoted an author who warned that: In some countries democracy has been brazenly cast aside. Elsewhere the rise of executive government has not overtly been at the expense of popular control, but nevertheless the same general characteristics are discernible: administration is put beyond democratic control. In the fascist countries executive government is freed of popular review by reference crudely to principles of leadership . . . in other countries more subtly by reference to the importance of the expert in solving complex problems.113”
― Neil Gorsuch, Over Ruled: The Human Toll of Too Much Law

“In its final form, Tocqueville envisioned a government that: extends its embrace to include the whole of society. It covers the whole of social life with a network of petty, complicated rules that are both minute and uniform, through which even men of the greatest originality and the most vigorous temperament cannot force their heads above the crowd. It does not break men’s will, but softens, bends, and guides it; it seldom enjoins, but often inhibits, action; it does not destroy anything, but prevents much from being born; it is not at all tyrannical, but it hinders, restrains, enervates, stifles, and stultifies so much that in the end each nation is no more than a flock of timid and hardworking animals with the government as its shepherd.130”
― Neil Gorsuch, Over Ruled: The Human Toll of Too Much Law

“As James L. Buckley, a former senator and federal appellate judge, put it, “once a federal law and its attendant regulations are in place, they are very difficult to change. This is so because of the laborious processes that bring them into being and because even the worst of them are apt to be protected by an ‘iron triangle,’ consisting of the legislators who brought them into being, the bureaucrats who oversee them, and those who benefit from the status quo, however flawed.”78 (We talk further about this phenomenon, and the concept of regulatory capture, in chapter 5.)”
― Neil Gorsuch, Over Ruled: The Human Toll of Too Much Law

“Here is just a partial list of some of the seminal legislation enacted during just two decades, the 1960s and 1970s. Many of these laws are now household names, many do vital work, and in many ways it is difficult to imagine life without some of them. Yet all are relatively new additions to our social order. Age Discrimination in Employment Act of 1967 Clean Air Act Clean Water Act Consumer Credit Protection Act Consumer Product Safety Act Controlled Substances Act Department of Transportation Act Economic Opportunity Act of 1964 Economic Stabilization Act of 1970 Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965 Employee Retirement Income Security Act of 1974 Endangered Species Act of 1973 Environmental Quality Improvement Act of 1970 Equal Credit Opportunity Act Equal Employment Opportunity Act of 1972 Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1968 Federal Election Campaign Act of 1971 Federal Land Policy and Management Act of 1976 Food and Agriculture Act of 1965 Food Stamp Act of 1964 Gun Control Act of 1968 Higher Education Act of 1965 Housing and Urban Development Act of 1965 Land and Water Conservation Act of 1965 Marine Mammal Protection Act of 1972 National Environmental Policy Act of 1969 National Forest Management Act of 1976 Occupational Safety and Health Act of 1970 Older Americans Act of 1965 Organized Crime Control Act of 1970 Safe Drinking Water Act Wild and Scenic Rivers Act Wilderness Act”
― Neil Gorsuch, Over Ruled: The Human Toll of Too Much Law

“Paradoxically, one of those challenges may lie in law itself. Some law is surely essential to our nation’s flourishing and our well-being as individuals. But what happens to rule-of-law values when we demand ever more from the law, when we insist on national rules before considering local solutions, and when we permit unelected officials to make more of the rules that govern us? What happens to our individual freedoms and to our aspirations for equal treatment under law? And what happens to our respect for law itself? Put another way: What rule-of-law values do we place at risk when we forget why the Constitution left so much authority to state and local authorities, why it sought to make lawmaking so hard, and why it insisted on vesting the lawmaking function in elected representatives accountable to the people in regular elections? These, too, are questions explored in the pages that follow.”
― Neil Gorsuch, Over Ruled: The Human Toll of Too Much Law

“Or, to borrow from Hannah Arendt (who devoted much of her life to studying totalitarian regimes), the rule of law seeks to protect “man’s power to begin something new out of his own resources.”84”
― Neil Gorsuch, Over Ruled: The Human Toll of Too Much Law

“For Madison, down any other path lay “calamitous” risks. In governments where lawmaking is easy, he wrote, laws can quickly become “so voluminous that they cannot be read, or so incoherent that they cannot be understood,” and they may “undergo such incessant changes that no man, who knows what the law is today, can guess what it will be tomorrow.” The “sagacious, the enterprising, and the moneyed few” may be able to anticipate, influence, and even profit from so much shifting law. But the “industrious . . . mass of the people” can do none of those things. In the end, law serves as an instrument only “for the few, not for the many,” sapping and ultimately destroying confidence in public institutions and law itself.79”
― Neil Gorsuch, Over Ruled: The Human Toll of Too Much Law

“Madison’s study of history persuaded him that people are naturally ambitious and tend to seek power over not just their own lives but others’. That fact of human nature, he believed, meant that the only sure way to protect our individual rights and keep government “off the backs of people” was to pit ambition against ambition.77”
― Neil Gorsuch, Over Ruled: The Human Toll of Too Much Law

“One of the “essential purposes” of our founding documents, Justice William O. Douglas famously wrote, “was to take government off the backs of people and keep it off.”74 Historically, after all, Americans have cherished the right to form their own opinions, speak their minds freely, and worship (or not) without interference. We like to think of our homes as our castles, generally subject to invasion only with a lawful warrant. We take for granted that authorities cannot deny our freedom without the assent of an impartial jury and due process.”
― Neil Gorsuch, Over Ruled: The Human Toll of Too Much Law

“But just consider what America looked like when Alexis de Tocqueville traveled the country in the 1830s. As the historian Niall Ferguson has observed, Tocqueville “marveled” at the way early Americans “preferred voluntary association to government regulation.”65 As Tocqueville himself recorded, “not only do they have commercial and industrial associations . . . they also have a thousand other kinds: religious, moral, grave, futile, very general and very particular, immense and very small; Americans use associations to give fetes, to found seminaries, to build inns, to raise churches, to distribute books . . . [and] create hospitals, prisons, schools.” In short, Tocqueville concluded, “everywhere that, at the head of a new undertaking, you see the government in France and a great lord in England, count on it that you will perceive an association in the United States.”66”
― Neil Gorsuch, Over Ruled: The Human Toll of Too Much Law

“Really, the questions at the heart of this book are ancient ones. At the dawn of our republic, James Madison contemplated the dangers to individual freedom, equal treatment of persons, and respect for law itself when a nation’s laws are allowed to grow “so voluminous that they cannot be read, or so incoherent that they cannot be understood . . . or undergo such incessant changes that no man, who knows what the law is today, can guess what it will be tomorrow.”13 But if the questions Madison posed are old ones, they also seem to me ones with special relevance to our times.”
― Neil Gorsuch, Over Ruled: The Human Toll of Too Much Law

“But what about everyday Americans and the rights promised to them in our Declaration of Independence, Constitution, and Bill of Rights? What happens to those people and their foundational freedoms—like the right to speak, pray, and gather freely—when our laws increasingly restrict what we may say, monitor what we do, and tell us how we may live? What does it mean for our nation’s promise of equal treatment when our laws become so numerous and so complex that only an affluent or connected few can navigate their way? And what happens to our respect for law itself when the law no longer just reflects commonsense norms but includes unpredictable traps for the unwary?”
― Neil Gorsuch, Over Ruled: The Human Toll of Too Much Law