Independent New Hampshire Journalism · Northfield, NH

Nobody Can Count the Laws You’re Presumed to Know

The Justice Department tried to tally America’s criminal laws and gave up. A sitting Supreme Court justice wrote a book about the wreckage. And New Hampshire’s 424 lawmakers keep adding to the pile.

On July 2, 2026, Governor Kelly Ayotte vetoed nine more bills. That brought her 2026 veto count to 24, double her 2025 total, with more legislation still headed to her desk. That is one week, one branch, one small state. Multiply it by every session in Concord, every agency in Washington, every town council in the Lakes Region, and every Congress since Eisenhower, and you arrive at the defining legal fact of American life: there are too many laws for anyone to count, let alone obey with full knowledge.

That is not a slogan. It is arithmetic, and the arithmetic has been tried. The federal government has attempted to count its own criminal laws at least three times since 1982 and quit or shrugged each time. Yet every one of those uncounted laws ships with the same warranty stamped on the box: ignorance is no excuse. You are legally presumed to know a body of law that the government itself cannot inventory.

This complaint does not belong to a party. A Trump executive order, a book by Justice Neil Gorsuch, a Boston criminal-defense lawyer’s bestseller, and a warning James Madison wrote in 1788 all land on the same square. So does a topless-yoga arrest at Weirs Beach. Stay with me.

The government tried to count. It gave up.

In 1982 the U.S. Department of Justice set out to answer a question no one in Washington could: how many federal crimes exist? The project ran two years. Staff turned pages by hand through a criminal code scattered across 50 titles and 23,000 pages, according to the Law Library of Congress, and produced an estimate of roughly 3,000 offenses. Not a count. An estimate, from the agency whose job is to prosecute those offenses.

The American Bar Association looked at the problem again in 1998 and declined to even attempt a page-by-page recount, calling the task too massive. Its task force settled for a growth measurement instead, concluding that more than 40 percent of the federal criminal provisions enacted since the Civil War arrived after 1970. Law professor John Baker updated the estimate in 2008 for the Heritage Foundation: at least 4,450 federal offenses, with no sign of Congress slowing down. In 2022, Heritage researchers finally threw an algorithm at the problem. Their “Count the Code” study scanned roughly 48,000 sections of the U.S. Code and estimated 5,199 federal crimes as of 2019, a 73 percent increase since the DOJ’s hand count. Even that team called it an estimate.

Sit with the sequence. The most exhaustive effort ever mounted was abandoned as hopeless by the man who ran it. The lawyers’ own professional association refused to try. The best modern number required custom software and still carries an error bar. Congress writes the crimes. Nobody keeps the ledger.

And the statute books are the shallow end

Statutes are only what Congress passes. The deeper water is regulation, where agencies write rules that carry criminal penalties of their own. The Federal Register, the government’s daily rule journal, ran 2,620 pages in its first year, 1936. By 1970 it was 20,036 pages. In 2024 it hit 106,109 pages, the highest total ever recorded, by the Office of the Federal Register’s own tally.

Those rules settle into the Code of Federal Regulations, and here the White House has done my job for me. Executive Order 14294, signed May 9, 2025, opens with a confession you should read twice: the CFR contains over 48,000 sections stretching past 175,000 pages, and no one, likely including the Department of Justice, knows how many separate criminal offenses hide inside it. The order cites an outside estimate of hundreds of thousands of regulatory crimes. The stated purpose is that no American should become a criminal for violating “a regulation they have no reason to know exists.”

Notice what that order concedes. To fix the problem, the government first had to admit the count does not exist. Agencies filed their referral guidance in June 2025, and some, like the General Services Administration, have posted their offense lists. Whether every agency met the May 2026 deadline is its own accountability story, and Granite State Report has not audited the full set. The lists that do exist are the first time in American history a citizen could look up, agency by agency, what conduct can put them in a federal courtroom. That this counts as a breakthrough in 2026 is the indictment.

The people the pile lands on

John Yates fished the Gulf of Mexico out of Florida. In 2007 a state officer measured his red grouper and flagged some as undersized. Yates was later charged under a federal records-destruction statute, 18 U.S.C. § 1519, written after Enron’s shredders, carrying up to 20 years, because the missing “tangible objects” he was accused of destroying were fish thrown overboard. The Supreme Court threw out the conviction in Yates v. United States (2015). Justice Gorsuch and co-author Janie Nitze open their 2024 book Over Ruled: The Human Toll of Too Much Law with his story, and the title is the argument: a sitting justice of the Supreme Court believed the volume of American law had become a threat worth a book. By the government’s own measure, the authors note, Americans spend on the order of 9.78 billion hours a year on federal paperwork.

Harvey Silverglate got there fifteen years earlier. His book Three Felonies a Day argues that the ordinary professional now commits arguable federal crimes before dinner without knowing it, because the laws have grown too broad and too vague to steer by. Attorney Mike Chase built a whole catalog of the absurd in How to Become a Federal Criminal, including, as he documents, the federal offense of making an unreasonable gesture to a horse in a national park. My own book, Generational Malpractice, looks at the other end of the pipeline: every statute a legislature adds and never repeals is a standing obligation handed to people who were not born when it passed. The stack compounds. The inheritors never voted on it.

None of this is new. Madison warned in Federalist No. 62 that it would mean little to elect our own lawmakers if the laws became “so voluminous that they cannot be read.” He wrote that when the entire federal criminal code fit in a saddlebag. At a Supreme Court argument in 2021, Gorsuch put the modern version plainly, observing that we now live in a world where nearly everything has been criminalized. Between those two sentences sits two centuries of one-way accumulation.

New Hampshire runs the same machine, just smaller

Do not file this under federal problems. New Hampshire operates the largest state legislature in the country, a 400-member House and a 24-member Senate, and it produces like one. The 2025 session ran 169 days, and lawmakers introduced 731 House bills and 296 Senate bills, more than a thousand pieces of proposed law, by Stateside Associates’ session tally. Governor Ayotte signed over a hundred of them and vetoed a dozen. In June 2026 her office announced 54 signings in a single press release, among them House Bill 1013, titled, in the official text, “relative to games wherein the object is to capture a pig.” New Hampshire now has a state law about pig scrambles. The nine vetoes of July 2 pushed her 2026 total to 24 at that point.

The Revised Statutes Annotated already run past sixty titles; the criminal code alone sits in Title LXII. Beneath the RSA sits another layer most people never read: municipal ordinances. Ask Heidi Lilley, Kia Sinclair, and Ginger Pierro. No New Hampshire statute makes female toplessness a crime, but Laconia’s indecent-exposure ordinance does. The three were arrested at Weirs Beach in 2016, one of them mid-yoga. The New Hampshire Supreme Court upheld the ordinance 3–2 in 2019, and the U.S. Supreme Court declined the case in 2020. Conduct legal on one beach is a conviction on the next. Granite State Report covered that ordinance. The layers are the lesson: federal, state, municipal, each stratum legislating, none of them cross-indexed, and every resident presumed current on all of it.

Read that box again and hold it next to everything above it. The state that cannot hand you a complete list of its own crimes decided, by statute, that your ignorance of them is your problem, and it has held that position in writing since 1973. That bargain made rough sense when the criminal law tracked common conscience: theft, assault, fraud, things a person of ordinary judgment already knows are wrong. It stops making sense when the code sprawls past what its own enforcers can catalog and reaches pig scrambles and cheese specifications.

What a serious legislature would do

I am not arguing for fewer protections against theft or violence. I am arguing for a legible code, and the fixes are sitting in plain sight. Concord could order what Washington just ordered: require every state agency and the Attorney General to publish one complete, public, annually updated list of every criminal offense in New Hampshire statute and administrative rule, with penalties and the required mental state. If the federal government can inventory the CFR, the General Court can inventory the RSA. Add a default mens rea statute so no Granite Stater is convicted of a regulatory offense without a guilty mind unless the legislature says so explicitly. Put an enforcement note on every bill that creates a new offense, the way fiscal notes already flag cost, stating in plain language what conduct becomes illegal and who will police it. And pair creation with deletion: any session that adds crimes should be made to name the dead wood it repealed.

None of that requires a dime of new spending. It requires legislators to read their own output, which may be the heavier lift. When the General Court gavels in each January with its next stack of bills, every sponsor should be able to answer one question before the first hearing: can a working person in Northfield or Laconia find out, in one place, what your state already forbids? Today the honest answer is no. Until it is yes, “ignorance of the law is no excuse” is not a principle in New Hampshire. It is a bluff, and the state is holding handcuffs behind it.

— Dexter Dow, Granite State Report

Fact check

Editor’s note. Every factual claim above was checked against the sources in the fact-check table before publication; rows marked ATTRIBUTED rest on named studies, publisher texts, or official releases rather than primary documents, and estimates are labeled as estimates. This is an analytical piece built on documentary sources; no live interview appears, and the editor will seek comment from New Hampshire legislative leadership for follow-up coverage on a state criminal-offense inventory. Corrections: Granite State Report corrects verified errors promptly and appends a dated note identifying what changed and when. The corrections policy and the corrections register are public, and correction notes are never removed.