REVIEW: ‘Over Ruled: The Human Toll of Too Much Law’ by Neil Gorsuch and Janie Nitze
When the Washington Free Beacon asked me to review Over Ruled, I was honored, intrigued, and amused. Honored because this was Justice Neil Gorsuch’s latest work that’s not printed in U.S. Reports, the official publisher of Supreme Court opinions. Intrigued because he, along with his sometime coauthor and former clerk Janie Nitze (an accomplished lawyer in her own right) were arguing that our rule of law was suffering because we had not just too many laws—that ground has been well-trod, not least by my former colleague Walter Olson, who founded and for over 20 years ran the first-ever legal blog, Overlawyered—but too much law.
And amused because I myself have a book coming out called Lawless, which chronicles the illiberal takeover of legal education, with the danger that foretells for the future gatekeepers of our legal and political institutions. (It’s an irony that’s really two sides of the same coin, because too much law leads to arbitrary governance—as Gorsuch and Nitze put it, "the rule of law does not mean the rule by law.") Not only that, but my book and Over Ruled share the same publisher, editors, and even literary agent.
Continue reading the entire piece here at The Washington Free Beacon
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Ilya Shapiro is a senior fellow and director of Constitutional Studies at the Manhattan Institute. Follow him on Twitter here.
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