Book Review: Over Ruled, by Neil Gorsuch and Janie Nitze

 Subtitle: The Human Toll of Too Much Law

Neil Gorsuch, associate justice of the Supreme Court for seven years, lays out a few key points:

•      The explosive growth of laws and regulations purporting to govern every aspect of life in the United States over the last fifty years.

•      The creation of a federal bureaucracy to write the regulations, enforce both law and regulation, and review any complaints or appeals.

o   The bypassing of the constitutional balance of powers that the founders intended to protect citizens from abuse of power, by the creation of this all-encompassing bureaucracy.

•      Examples where the legitimate intent of laws and regulations has been ignored by civil servants (a.k.a. Masters) in applying them to circumstances far afield from their purpose, showing how ridiculous people in the bureaus and departments can control and destroy the lives of others through overreach.

•      The loss of local and state authority due to federal sovereignty, including the loss of flexibility to tailor laws to unique local situations.

•      Corporations’ use of legal compliance to shield themselves from responsibility.

•      What happens when sovereign, unchecked authority goes off the rails (enforcing evil social or cultural norms, such as slavery). 

My impression from the examples presented by Justice Gorsuch is that they range from human sin to demonic evil, but book does not address the spiritual dimension of governmental overreach. The author does recall historical examples from other times and places in which governmental overreach did not end well (e.g., Nazi Germany). As is appropriate to a lawyer working within our legal system, he ends with a call to begin the political process of reducing the legal and regulatory burden on our citizens. He cites one noteworthy success, the deregulation of the airline industry in 1978.

The desire to control other people goes back to the creation of humankind, and derived directly from the fall. Whether it takes the form of  chattel slavery, or laws that go beyond the basics of right and wrong to prevent others from doing things we don’t like, the free will endowed by our creator is wrongfully abrogated. Satan desires to enslave humankind, the ultimate denial of free will. Justice Gorsuch elaborates how Satan’s human dupes are implementing his plan.