Better ‘civic education’ needed for an America overrun by ‘too much law,’ argues Supreme Court Justice Gorsuch

Americans need to better understand how their government works if they want to address the problem of overregulation, says U.S. Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch.

In Over Ruled: The Human Toll of Too Much Law, Gorsuch and Janie Nitze share the stories of Americans who have endured tremendous suffering due to seemingly harmless actions that have ended up entangling them in serious court cases.

Gorsuch spoke about the book and the ideas behind it in this week’s episode of Daily Wire’s The Sunday Special.

He told host Ben Shapiro that the massive problem of overregulation and its devastating effect on average Americans may not have just one single solution, but that having an American people who “understand what we’re talking about, why we have three branches of government,” is an essential component in the effort to resolve that situation. 

“I mean, a third of Americans can’t name the three branches of government, let alone know why we have them,” Gorsuch began. “Sixty percent of Americans would fail the citizenship test my wife took to become an American citizen. And let me tell you, that test is a heck of a lot easier than filling out the forms required, which I wasn’t very good at. 

“So, this isn’t going to work, unless the American people want it to work, and to want it to work, they have to know how it was designed. 

“They have to also be able to talk with one another again, and learn how to disagree, because democracy, at the end of the day, is about disagreement – disagreements make our ideas stronger and our decisions better.” 

With a show that draws the attention of many young people, Shapiro wondered how Gorsuch would set up a civic education program for youth, and which primary texts he might use. 

“What are the most important things for, say, a 15-year-old kid to read and understand in order to really understand what you’re talking about here?” the host and author asked. 

“One organization I’m involved with, by way of disclosure, is the Constitution Center in Philadelphia, and the resources they have online for free are incredible,” Gorsuch answered. 

“You can have something called an interactive Constitution. You can click on any clause of the Constitution and get three things immediately: two scholars who disagree about the clause’s meaning and appropriate interpretation, but they’ll sit down first and talk about what they agree on; and then you’ll have the two other videos with their additional independent thoughts.  

“You could also read there all the books that James Madison read as he was preparing for the Constitutional Convention. They have those primary resources there, and they have also a curriculum for high schools that, for free for use, teach about the Constitution and our history in really an incredibly powerful way.” 

Gorsuch says he also recommends, for middle-school children, iCivics, which was founded by the late Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor. 

“[T]here are interactive games to play that will teach you about the Constitution and our history,” he said. “There’s a new one involving Colonial Williamsburg, and you can pretend you’re a spy right during the beginning of the Independence movement. It’s a lot of fun.” 

Gorsuch said America’s system of government is “genius, and the separation of powers is what keeps us free, and it is what has made this country great, and the rule of law so profoundly stable in this country.” 

There are dangers, he warned, in abandoning our system of government, as designed by the Framers. 

“I mean … if you look around the world, you’re going to find ‘better’ Bills of Rights than ours,” Gorsuch said. “I mean, North Korea happens to have my favorite Bill of Rights. It has everything we promise, all manner of good things, and even my favorite right – the right to relaxation, which I really need in the summertime after a long term.  

“But it isn’t worth the paper it’s written on … because all power is concentrated in a single set of hands, or a single group’s hands, and that’s what our Framers knew: that men are no angels, as Madison said, and you have to assiduously divide and check and balance power at every turn. 

“When we forget that, it’s a danger I worry about.” 

On the other hand, there is the danger of having “too much law.” 

“The more law you have, the danger is you’re actually going to disaffect people from law and their institutions,” Gorsuch explained. “Caligula knew this, right? He used to post his laws written in a hand so small, and on columns so high – deliberately did this so that nobody could ever be sure what the law was. So, they lived in fear, and fear and distrust for our institutions and for law itself is one of the costs of too much law.” 

Gorsuch praises the Americans he discusses in his book, those who have prevailed through devastating losses at the hands of government overregulation – sometimes rearing its ugly head in licensure laws – and have made a difference. 

He says he wrote the book because, as a judge for 18 years now, he continued to see cases where “ordinary Americans, hard-working, decent people trying to do the right thing, just getting caught up in laws and legal problems that they had no way to imagine – just getting flagged.”  

“There are so many federal crimes now buried in … regulations adopted by agencies, not necessarily by Congress, that nobody knows how many there are,” he explained. 

One woman, for example, who lost her home and had her business raided by police, the justice said, “fought for 20 years to rectify the situation, and, in fact, changed how Texas looks at licensing laws.” 

Gorsuch said these are the stories that inspire hope and underscore, for him, that “the American people love this country”: 

“They love their Constitution, and they want it to work. And I think if you look at the long stretch of history in our country, have there been bad times before, and trying times? Absolutely! But have there been remarkable moments when the human spirit and the courage of Americans has prevailed and triumphed?  

“Time and time again, and I just wouldn’t bet against the American people.”