Justice Neil Gorsuch’s soft spot for the little guy shines through in his judicial opinions. It finds emphatic expression in “Over Ruled”—not a legal argument or brief but a “book of stories.” It recounts the harrowing fates of regular folks whose efforts to make an honest living, to live their faith or to contribute to their communities were derailed by overbearing prosecutors and administrative “experts.”

John Yates, a Florida fisherman, was accused of tossing three purportedly undersize fish overboard, allegedly with the intent of impeding a federal investigation into his fishing practices. He was convicted for having violated the Sarbanes Oxley Act. Though intended to regulate the financial industry, the act broadly criminalizes the destruction not only of records but also of “tangible objects,” including (the government insisted) fish. The Supreme Court reversed the conviction by a single vote. That, Justice Gorsuch notes, was small comfort to a defendant whose livelihood had effectively been destroyed in eight years in litigation.

The hapless citizens who get entrapped in the legal thicket range from a magician who failed to submit an adequate “disaster contingency plan” for his rabbit to the racecar driver Bobby Unser. He barely escaped a nasty blizzard in the San Juan Mountains in Colorado, only to be fined for operating his snowmobile in a protected wilderness area (he said he was only near one). Some of the stories in “Over Ruled” aren’t entirely new, but Justice Gorsuch tells them well. The proliferation of law and especially criminal law over the past half-century, Justice Gorsuch suggests, reflects a decline of trust throughout so ciety. Legal authority has migrated upward to Congress and then sideways to federal agencies that enforce some 5,000 statutory criminal provi sions and 300,000-plus regula tions carrying criminal penalties.

That much law, the justice convincingly argues, erodes the very values of the rule of law—foremost, the protection of private liberties and expectations. Such protection is gone when the law is impenetrable, unknowable and unpredictable. Civic distrust and contempt for public institutions grow.

To those familiar concerns, Justice Gorsuch adds an important and, as he emphasizes, Madisonian point: Mutable, proliferating law subverts equality. The wealthy and fortunate can find ways to comply with legal complexity and exploit it to their advantage. The costs fall disproportionately on the less privileged—the “marginal producers,” in the economists’ anodyne language, whose stories fill this book: fishermen, apple growers, restaurant owners.

To Justice Gorsuch’s mind, the government’s response to Covid-19 crystallized the worst tendencies of our legal regime: excessive centralization; executive hubris and overreach; heightened social distrust and isolation. “Forget bowling alone; people died alone,” he writes. “Our rules made an already lonely society lonelier.” In these pages, this uncommonly gracious man sounds angry. I for one don’t blame him.

Justice Gorsuch acknowledges that “too much law” is a matter of degree and judgment. The Sarbanes Oxley Act has legitimate uses; but three fish? “Nothing in excess,” he urges wisely. The trade-offs, though, may be more vexing than he lets on.

Lamenting the excessive centralization of our legal regime, Justice Gorsuch champions states as “laboratories of democracy.” Against that worn-out cliché stands a Madisonian suspicion: The narrower the compass of interest-group politics, the more oppressive it tends to become. Seemingly pointless licensing requirements for hair braiders and casket makers, for example, are the products of entrenched interests that too often prevail in state legislatures.

Justice Gorsuch duly notes the point and observes that such cozy arrangements now cover a mind-blowing array of trades. Well, then: Might it make sense to terminate the states’ judge-made exemption from the Sherman Anti-Trust Act (1890) and have the Federal Trade Commission enforce its prohibitions? The price of yet more centralization and delegation may be worth paying, in the interest of eradicating government-created cartels that are immune to market competition.

Similarly, one would think that states should at least be constrained to experiment on their own citizens. Yet in 2023, the Supreme Court in National Pork Producers Council v. Ross upheld a California law prohibiting the in-state sale of pork products unless the pigs were raised under conditions deemed sufficiently humane under the statute and implementing regulations. California itself produces virtually no pork; it is simply telling producers elsewhere how to run their business.

State laws of that type have proliferated. They, too, are a form of centralization: Firms that cannot keep their products out of hostile jurisdictions must comply with the rules of the most restrictive state. They, too, delegate power to unelected bureaucrats and erode accountability: State officials rather enjoy regimenting people who can neither vote them out of office nor exit the jurisdiction. They, too, threaten inequality: A corporate giant like Smithfield Foods can easily comply; an Iowa farmer, not so much. They, too, threaten discord: For every blue-state tit, a red-state tat.

Justice Gorsuch wrote the majority opinion in Pork Producers and in the book commends California’s law as a salutary example of state experimentation. It is easy to draw a different lesson.

At the end of the day, Justice Gorsuch rightly cautions, courts cannot do much about too much law and its human toll. Foremost, he writes, our democracy “depends on the courage and sacrifice of men and women willing to stand up, even at a high personal cost, to defend the rights to democratic self-rule. . . . We stand in awe of them.” Well said. Yet the salt-of-the-earth citizens and litigants portrayed in these pages would in turn benefit from courts that are mindful and forthright about the trade-offs at the edges of law’s empire.