Ilya Shapiro writes for the Washington Free Beacon about the latest book from U.S. Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch and his former clerk Janie Nitze.
[W]e can get to what I promise will be the only block quote of this review, because it really encapsulates the authors’ project:
“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?”
Gorsuch and Nitze illustrate those rhetorical questions with stories that involve a fisherman caught in Sarbanes-Oxley’s net and a magician pulling endless red tape out of a hat; monks facing the business death penalty for selling unlicensed caskets and Amish communities woven out for selling unlicensed baskets; people near a Superfund site who weren’t allowed to clean up their own land and regulators who got their fingers all over Ernest Hemingway’s six-toed cats!
All of these meticulously researched stories—chock-full of personal interviews—show that, even as we glory in “law’s empire” and hold up John Adams’s maxim of “a government of laws, not of men,” there can be such a thing as too many laws. Indeed, long before our current bouts with inflation caused by overspending, America began suffering from an inflation that had little to do with economics. That’s legislative inflation, an excess of lawmaking leading to positive declarations and regulations where social norms would otherwise be sufficient. Unfortunately, the iron laws of economics hold in political science, and legislative inflation leads to a devaluation of the law.
