Courage remains as important in the legal profession today as it was then. Throughout our history lawyers who have made the greatest mark on this cou… - Neil Gorsuch

If you were to sit down to read through all of our criminal laws and regulations- or at least flip through them- you would find plenty of surprises, too. You would learn, for example, that it's a federal crime to "injure[]" a government-owned lamp in Washington, D.C., consult with a known pirate, or advertise wine by suggesting its intoxicating qualities. The truth is, we now have so many federal criminal laws covering so many things that one scholar suggests that "there is no one in the United States over the age of 18 who cnanot be indicted for some federal crime." In case you think that's an exaggeration, he adds: "That is not an exaggeration."
It's a state of affairs that sometimes makes it hard not to wonder how far we have left to travel to a world described by Lavrentiy Beria, the chief of Joseph Stalin's secret police, who was reputed to have bragged, "Show me the man and I'll show you the crime." Don't think it can happen here? Ask John Yates, who was convicted for an offense he'd probably never heard of, one that few would have imagined would apply to him, and one that robbed him and his family of the life they cherished.

Judicial decisions, as well, contain vital information about how all our laws and rules operate. Today, most of these decisions can be found on searchable electronic databases, but some come with high subscription fees. If you can't afford those, you may have to consult a library. Good luck finding what you need there: reported federal decisions now fill 5,000 volumes Each volume clocks in at about 1,000 pages, for a total of more than 5 million pages. Back in 1997, Thomas Baker, a law professor, found taht "the cumulative output of all the lower federal courts... amounts to a small, but respectable library that, when stacked end-to-end, runs for one-and-one-half football fields." One can only wonder how many football fields we're up to now.

Our system of separated powers and checks-and-balances threatens to give way to the continual and permanent accretion of power in the hands of one man. That is no recipe for a republic.