Legalism Threatens Our Rule of Law: a review of Over Ruled by Neil Gorsuch (Larry P. Arnn, Law & Liberty)
Over Ruled is replete with harrowing, true tales like this one. It also explains how laws and prosecutions have grown in number and size, like metastasizing tumors. Today most of our “laws” (or rules and regulations with the full force and effect of law) come from administrative agencies that work like somnambulant beavers; half asleep, but numerous enough in their swarms to dam up the flow of society. The authors document that such laws and the agencies that make them are uncounted, or at least that their number is controversial, even among defenders of this regulatory swamp.
A bitter irony emerges: The sheer quantity of the laws and prosecutions negates the rule of law. Gorsuch quotes Publius: “If the laws be 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”—then justice is dead. In other words, if citizens cannot know the law, they cannot obey it. Conversely, those who enforce the law may do what they please, and they will get used to it.
The one benefit of Trumpism: he’s made us all Gorsuchian.