Judge Gorsuch warns dangerous overabundance of federal laws 'undermines respect for law itself'

Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch warned that an explosion of federal laws is so burdensome that ordinary Americans now risk being upended by a hellish legal nightmare.

The Trump appointee is out with a new book titled “Over Ruled: The Human Toll of Too Much Law,” in which he and co-author Janie Nitze tell the stories of people who didn't know they'd broken some obscure law and suddenly they found themselves sucked into the uncompromising machine of the federal legal system.

In the book, the conservative justice reflects on his career on the federal bench and “that he had seen many, many cases where the sheer volume and complexity of our laws had swallowed up ordinary people.”

Gorsuch writes that while “some law is essential to our lives and our liberties,” that “too much law” can put those same liberties “at risk and even undermine respect for the law itself.”

(Video: Fox News)

“I had a case in the 10th Circuit where a high school student burst into a series of belches in class to entertain his classmates,” Gorsuch recalled during an appearance on “Fox & Friends” earlier this week. “And instead of going to the principal's office or calling his parents, he was arrested, handcuffed, and that's the kind of thing that you just have to ask yourself, could we be handling this differently? “

He also spoke about the large number of laws that have been implemented, another example of administrative insanity in the state.

“It used to be that the entire federal code could fit in one volume, today it fills an entire wall in my office,” he told host Ainsley Earhardt. “We have more than doubled the number of crimes on the books in my lifetime. There are so many crimes in the federal statutes that nobody knows how many there are. It would take years just to read them out loud. There are there are hundreds and hundreds of thousands.”

“As a judge, my job is to apply the law … The best I can do is share with you what I have seen from my unusual vantage point in our legal system,” Gorsuch writes in his book.

He said that “we now have so many federal criminal laws covering so many things that one scholar suggests that 'there is no one in the United States over the age of 18 who cannot be charged with some federal crime.'

Released on August 6, “Overruled” has skyrocketed up the charts and is currently the #1 bestseller on Amazon.

“America has always been a nation of laws. But today our laws have grown so vast and reached so deeply into our lives that it is worth asking: In our reverence for the law, have we gone too far ?reads the book's description. “In recent decades, the laws of this nation have increased in number, and the punishments they carry are increasingly severe elected officials, but many now come from agency officials, largely insulated from democratic accountability.”

“There were so many cases that came to me where I saw ordinary Americans, every day, normal people trying to go about their lives, not trying to hurt anybody or do anything bad and just get hit, unexpectedly, because of some legal rule, they didn't know about it”, Gorsuch he said.

Staff writer

Chris Donaldson is a regular, ordinary American who is concerned about rampant corruption, as well as the ongoing attacks on our way of life by those who despise our hard-won freedoms. A Navy veteran, he has been a frequent contributor to conservative websites and resides in Florida.

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