It does not take long — the first chapter — before Gorsuch misleads the reader in Over Ruled.
He is discussing the case of John Yates, a commercial fisherman who was prosecuted after wildlife agents discovered that he had caught undersized red grouper in the Gulf of Mexico in violation of federal regulations.
Here is the story as Gorsuch tells it: One day in 2007, an agent boarded Yates’ boat and spent hours “rummaging through” a pile of fish before he then “declared” that Yates had caught 72 fish considered too small to capture under federal law. The agent returned several days later and again found nearly 70 undersized fish, but the measurements did not match those from days earlier. “From that and other evidence,” Gorsuch writes, “the agent grew suspicious that the fish at the dock were not the same fish he had measured at sea.”
