Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch highlighted an example from his new book about how having hundreds of thousands of federal laws on the books harms average Americans who have no idea that the laws even exist.
Gorsuch made the remarks about his new book “Over Ruled: The Human Toll of Too Much Law” during an interview on PBS’s “Firing Line with Margaret Hoover” that aired Friday when asked about how the sheer volume of laws “present a burden on average Americans”.
“Well, let’s do the numbers. In just my lifetime, federal law has grown massively,” he said. “We’ve seen maybe a doubling in the number of federal criminal offenses on the books. There are so many regulations now carrying criminal consequences that nobody knows how many there are. There are at least 300,000.”
Gorsuch then delved into a story from his a book about John and Sandra Yates, a married couple who were high school sweethearts that moved to Florida so John could pursue his passion of wanting to be a fisherman.
“He worked his way up from deckhand to becoming captain of his own crew,” Gorsuch said. “And he’s out one day and an agent comes up and says, I would like to measure your fish. I’m not sure they’re all the right size. They had to be at least 20 inches. He spends the whole day measuring thousands of pounds of red grouper and decides 72 are undersized. He says, put them in a crate and I’ll deal with you when you get back to dock.”
“A few days later, he does. He measures them again, but this time only 69 are undersized,” he continued. “Now John’s expecting a citation or something and if that’s the way it goes, that’ll be fine. But he hears nothing from the government for three years until one day agents surround his house. They charge him with violating the Sarbanes-Oxley Act which was adopted after the Enron financial accounting scandal.”
“Now, the statute says if you destroy, intentionally, accounting records, documents, things like that, or other tangible objects, you’re guilty,” he continued. “The government’s theory in the case, apparently, was that he intentionally threw overboard 72 red grouper, tangible objects, and replaced them with 69 still undersized fish. Now, John thought that was about the silliest thing he ever heard, but he was found guilty by a jury, appealed and lost, spent Christmas in jail. And he was ready to give up. But Sandra, his wife, said, no, you got to appeal this because this is just wrong. Brought it all the way to the Supreme Court of the United States and won, 5 to 4. Sandra was angry that she didn’t get more votes.”
Gorsuch noted that a Harvard law professor that he cited in his book estimates that the average American commits three felonies a day because of how many laws exist.
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