In Over Ruled: The Human Toll of Too Much Law, US Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch and his former clerk, Janie Nitze, describe the extent to which the United States had been engulfed by a tsunami of federal laws and regulations. Summarizing the book in the Atlantic, the authors say:
Our country has always been a nation of laws, but something has changed dramatically in recent decades. … Less than 100 years ago, all of the federal government’s statutes fit into a single volume. By 2018, the U.S. Code encompassed 54 volumes and approximately 60,000 pages. Over the past decade, Congress has adopted an average of 344 new pieces of legislation each session. That amounts to 2 million to 3 million words of new federal law each year. Even the length of bills has grown—from an average of about two pages in the 1950s to 18 today. …
Federal agencies have been busy too. They write new rules and regulations implementing or interpreting Congress’s laws. Many bear the force of law. … When the Federal Register started in 1936, it was 16 pages long. In recent years, that publication has grown by an average of more than 70,000 pages annually.
After providing many horrifying examples of the havoc too much law can play on the lives of ordinary people, Gorsuch and Nitze conclude:
The Roman emperor Caligula used to post his new laws on columns so tall and in a hand so small that the people could not read them. The whole point was to ensure that people lived in fear—the most powerful of a tyrant’s weapons. Our Founders wanted no part of that for us. As much as they revered written laws, they also knew that when we turn to law to solve every problem and answer humanity’s age-old debates about how we should live, raise our children, and pray, we invite a Leviathan into our lives.
The problem of too much law isn’t confined to the federal government. It’s a huge problem here in North Carolina as well, and the John Locke Foundation has been sounding the alarm about it for years. See here for our analysis and recommendations.
