Supreme Court judge criticizes expansion of laws and defends Trump’s immunity

“When there are too few laws, we are not safe and our liberties are not protected,” Gorsuch told The Associated Press in an interview in his Supreme Court office. “But when there are too many laws, those very things are actually compromised.”

“Over Ruled: The Human Toll of Too Much Law” might be published Tuesday by Harper, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers. Gorsuch received a $500,000 advance for the book, in response to his annual financial report.

In the interview, Gorsuch refused to have interaction in discussions about term limits or an enforceable code of ethics for judges. each have recently proposed by President Joe Biden at a time when public confidence within the court has waned. Justice Elena Kagan, who spoke a couple of days before Biden, said individually that the court’s ethics code, adopted by the justices last November, must have a way of enforcement.

Gorsuch, nevertheless, spoke concerning the importance of judicial independence. “I’m not saying there aren’t ways to improve what we have. I’m just saying we’ve been given something very special. The United States judiciary is the envy of the world,” he said.

The 56-year-old judge was the primary of three nominees to the Supreme Court by then-President Donald Trump. Together, they formed a conservative majority that overturned the Roe v. Wade ruling, ended minority admissions, expanded gun laws and rolled back environmental regulations to combat climate change and air and water pollution.

A month ago, the Supreme Court a term Gorsuch and the court’s five other conservative justices issued sharp rebukes of the executive state in three key cases, including the choice that overturned the 40-year-old Chevron decision that had made it more likely that courts would uphold regulations. The court’s three liberal justices dissented every time.

Gorsuch was also in the bulk when he ruled that former presidents enjoy broad immunity from criminal prosecution, delaying the election interference case against Trump indefinitely. In addition, the justices made it tougher to bring federal obstruction of justice charges against individuals who were a part of the mob that violently attacked the Capitol on January 6, 2021, in an try to overturn Trump’s loss to Biden within the 2020 election.

Gorsuch defended the immunity provision on the grounds that it was essential to stop presidents from being hampered during their term in office by the specter of prosecution after they leave office.

The court is grappling with an unprecedented situation, he said. “Here we have, for the first time in our history, a presidency bringing charges against a former president. That’s a serious question, isn’t it? Serious consequences,” Gorsuch said.

But within the book, co-authored by Janie Nitze, a former law clerk, Gorusch largely leaves those big issues aside and focuses on a fisherman, a magician, Amish farmers, immigrants, a hair braider and others who risked prison, heavy fines, deportation and other hardships due to unforgiving laws.

In his 18 years as a judge, the last seven of which were on the Supreme Court, Gorsuch said, “I’ve seen so many cases where I’ve seen ordinary Americans, ordinary people trying to live their lives, not wanting to hurt anyone or do anything bad, and then they were just unexpectedly struck down by a law they didn’t know about.”

The problem, he said, is the explosion of laws and regulations on the federal and state levels. The sheer volume of bills introduced by Congress within the last decade is staggering, he said. On average, 344 bills, each with a length of two to three million words, have been introduced annually.

One vignette concerns John Yates, a Florida fisherman who was convicted of disposing of an undersized grouper under a federal law that originally affected the accounting industry and the destruction of evidence within the Enron scandal. Yates’ case went all of the method to the Supreme Court, where he won by a single vote.

“I wanted to tell the stories of the people whose lives were affected,” Gorsuch said.

The book delves right into a theme that runs through Gorsuch’s views over time, from his criticism of the Chevron decision when he was on a federal appeals court in Denver to his statement in May 2023, during which he called the emergency measures taken in the course of the COVID-19 crisis, which killed greater than 1 million Americans, “perhaps the greatest intrusions on civil liberties in the peacetime history of this country.”

While Gorsuch has voted with the opposite conservative justices in many of the Court’s major cases, he has also joined the liberals in notable cases, including those during which he wrote the opinion in 2020 which prolonged protections against workplace discrimination to LGBTQ people. Gorsuch has also sided with the liberal justices in all the court’s cases involving Native Americans since taking office.

He also typically breaks together with his conservative colleagues on immigration policy, especially when opponents of deportation complain that they weren’t adequately informed concerning the hearings.

Gorsuch recently returned from a summer teaching task for George Mason University’s law school in Porto, Portugal. Last yr, he spent two weeks in Lisbon, Portugal, on the identical program, for which he received nearly $30,000 plus food, lodging and travel expenses.

Later this week, he’ll travel to the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in Simi Valley, California, to speak concerning the latest book.

The day he met with AP, he wore a tie for the primary time in weeks. He was wearing a dark blue suit, cowboy boots and a western-style belt.

He appeared relaxed, offering visitors chocolate chip cookies and occasional and joking with a reporter who spoke of an upcoming trip to the New Jersey shore. “Go and put some flags up there,” Gorsuch said, a reference to the controversy over flags just like those flown by the Jan. 6 rioters and Houses owned by Judge Samuel Alito and his wife.

Gorsuch is not the only justice releasing a book this summer. Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson’s memoir, “Lovely One,” might be released next month.