In his new book, Justice Neil Gorsuch quotes our very own Professor Baker. The book explores the exponential increase in the number and complexity of laws and regulations in the United States. Neil Gorsuch & Janie Nitze, Over Ruled: The Human Toll of Too Much Law (Harper Collins Publisher 2024) . The premise of the book is that while some laws are essential to our everyday existence and our freedoms, the accumulation of too many complex and overly burdensome laws can threaten those same freedoms and can even undermine respect for the law itself.
Professor Baker wrote a pathbreaking article in 1997, titled Tyrannous Lex (PDF), that explored this fundamentally unique question. He sought to estimate how much law we annually produce in the United States — the Gross Legal Product (“GLP”) — and to examine what effect that GLP has on the economy and the everyday lives of Americans. Justice Gorsuch took that idea as the point of departure for his book-length study and along the way he cited and quoted Professor Baker. “It was a nice surprise,” Professor Baker admitted, “a professor citing a justice is an everyday occurrence but a justice citing a professor is uncommon in a ‘man bites dog’ way and I think it is pretty cool.”
Professor Baker explained, “That article is one of my favorites. James Madison, who is a hero of mine, inspired it. In Federalist No. 62 , Madison warned us about the ‘calamitous’ effect of too much law: ‘It poisons the blessing of liberty itself . . . if the laws be so voluminous that they cannot be read, or so incoherent that they cannot be understood; if they be repealed or revised before they are promulgated, or undergo such incessant changes that [no one], who knows what the law is today, can guess what it will be tomorrow.’”