United States v. Pinero

Those people ... the departmental interpreters of the laws in Washington ... can always be depended on to take any reasonably good law and interpret the common sense all out of it.

Mark Twain in an unmailed letter to H.C. Christiancy, 18 Dec. 1887.

When our interpretation of the law unnecessarily drifts too far from the bounds of common sense, we risk losing credibility. As Thomas Jefferson said: “If you state a moral case to a plowman and a professor, the farmer will decide it as well, and often better, because he has not been led astray by any artificial rules.”

This concurrence is in…