Sunday, February 4, 2018

Neil Gorsuch quotes GKC

Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch recently quoted GKC. (Well, technically, he alluded to a passage from him, anyway).
But in a dissent, Justice Neil Gorsuch said Ginsberg had gotten the issues all wrong in the case. He was joined in dissent by justices Anthony Kennedy, Clarence Thomas, and Samuel Alito.

Borrowing from the English writer and philosopher G.K. Chesterton, Gorsush  [sic] said there’s a danger in clearing away “a fence just because we cannot see its point.”

“Even if a fence doesn’t seem to have a reason, sometimes all that means is we need to look more carefully for the reason it was built in the first place,” he said. “The same might be said about the law before us.”

To Gorsush [sic] what Ginsburg and her colleagues in the majority had done was clear away a traditional rule cause they mistakenly overlooked the original reasons for it [...]

Gorush [sic] concluded by accusing the majority of clearing away a fence “that once marked a basic boundary between federal and state power.

“Maybe it wasn’t the most vital fence and maybe we’ve just simply forgotten why this particular fence was built in the first place. But maybe, too, we’ve forgotten because we’ve wandered so far from the idea of a federal government of limited and enumerated powers that we’ve begun to lose sight of what it looked like in the first place,” Gorsuch wrote.
[Source]

And here is the passage in GKC's writing to which he alludes.

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