At the close of the Supreme Court’s last term, Justice Neil Gorsuch concurred in the court’s 6-3 decision discarding the 40-year-old Chevron doctrine, which required Article III judges to defer to federal agencies when Congress’s statutory language is ambiguous. Gorsuch noted while “sophisticated entities” can hire lawyers and lobbyists to “keep pace” with ever-changing regulatory provisions, “ordinary people” cannot. It is they, wrote the associate justice from Colorado, who are the beneficiaries of Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo.

In Over Ruled: The Human Toll of Too Much Law, Gorsuch and his co-author, former Supreme Court clerk Janie Nitze, write expansively of those “ordinary people” and the human toll exacted on them, which includes decades of fear, financial hardship, and stress, ending, at times, in imprisonment, bankruptcy, and madness or suicide. Over Ruled, as its title provides, is about the “rule of law,” but it is not at its core about the law, lawyers, or judges. Instead it is “a book of stories” of people grievously affected by “too much law.” It is no breezy narrative, however, but a deep dive — revealed by its 1,000 endnotes — into the aspiration of the founders when they created the “miracle” that is our constitutional republic, what happened along the way to put us into the situation where every person likely commits “three felonies a day,” and how we extricate ourselves from the mess we have made of things.