U.S. Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch made his case Friday at the Nixon Presidential Library & Museum that America’s legal system has grown far too complex.
“I have just seen so many cases come through my courtroom where ordinary Americans, hard-working, decent people, were caught up in, they’re just getting whacked by laws that they didn’t expect and they shouldn’t reasonably been able to expect,” Gorsuch said.
Gorsuch pointed around the room where a few hundred people were gathered and speculated that every single adult had likely committed a felony at some point, based on research for his new book.
It’s that new book, “Over Ruled: The Human Toll of Too Much Law,” that brought Gorsuch to the Nixon Library to talk about America’s legal system Friday afternoon. Gorsuch co-wrote it with Janie Nitze, one of his former law clerks, and has been on a media blitz, which included a stop at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in Simi Valley on Thursday.
The justice offered anecdotes from his book showing court cases where the legal system went awry. He talked about funeral directors in Louisiana who sought to prevent monks from selling low-cost caskets and of a hair braider in Texas who fought for 20 years to continue her business and teach others without having a barber’s license.
Gorsuch also told the story of Aaron Swartz, a well-known programmer who co-founded Reddit and was a free-information activist. At 24 years old, he was indicted on federal charges, accused of illegally gaining access to and downloading research journals from JSTOR, a digital library, with the intent to put them online for free.
JSTOR said at the time it was not their decision to prosecute, but the federal government’s. Swartz rejected a plea deal from federal prosecutors, believing he was innocent, Gorsuch said, and ended up being charged with computer and wire fraud.
“They brought more charges against him as punishment for refusing the plea deal effectively, at least in his eyes,” Gorsuch said. “So now, rather than face four to six months in prison he faced potentially decades in prison.”
Three months before the trial, Swartz died by suicide, Gorsuch said.
Over 90% of federal criminal cases nowadays are resolved with plea deals, Gorsuch said. There are pluses, making prosecution easier and cheaper, he said, but the downside is juries are removed from the process.
“Juries are supposed to be the check on judges and prosecutors in our system,” Gorsuch said. “They bring the ordinary and common sense wisdom of the masses.”
Nobody knows the total number of criminal laws on the books, but it’s at least 5,000, Gorsuch said.
Those figures drew some mild gasps from the audience.
“A hundred years ago the entire federal code could fit into one slim body,” Gorsuch said. “Today, it occupies a whole wall in my office. It’s doubled in size since the 1980s.”
Gorsuch was not asked — and did not offer up opinions of his own — on recent landmark Supreme Court decisions or President Joe Biden’s wishes to reform the court to include term limits and ethics oversight. Gorsuch told Fox News on Sunday that he didn’t want to comment on a political issue, but said, “Be careful.”
Gorsuch, who grew up in Colorado and was a judge on the U.S. 10th Circuit Court of Appeals before joining the nation’s highest court in 2017, said he felt good to be back in the West.
The room he sat in at the Nixon Library was a replica of the East Room at the White House.
“This replica of the East Room brings back a little PTSD,” Gorsuch said to laughter. “When I was introduced to the country at my nomination it was in the East Room. I think I was photographed more in one minute than I had been in my entire lifetime.”
After highlighting all the challenges people may face with the legal system, Gorsuch maintained that he was optimistic for the country.
Solutions, he said, wouldn’t come from “nine old people” on the Supreme Court in Washington, D.C., but from “the wisdom of the masses.”
“I think it starts in the schools and I think it starts in our homes,” Gorsuch said. “I think it’s up to you. If you don’t care, nothing will change.”
More specifically, he said, schools need to ensure civics is being taught and foster free speech better.
“This is not a right-left thing,” Gorsuch said.
Jon Startz, a Huntington Beach resident, attended the talk and said the cases Gorsuch presented left him feeling scared and pessimistic about the future of the country.
“I could relate to it,” Startz said. “A simple infraction of the law could tie you up in the system for years to come.”
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