This week I left my job suing the government to join the Cato Institute as Director of the Center for Constitutional Studies. The reactions have been overwhelmingly positive and I’m thrilled to return to an organization I’ve long respected. Many are now asking why I chose to leave what I still describe as a dream job.

Some of my responses are conventional: I had been a civil rights attorney for ten years. Change is good. Litigation is all-consuming. And at some point, people seek new challenges. But I also came to believe I could be a more effective advocate for liberty if I worked outside of the courts. Here’s why.

For a variety of reasons that I’ll leave to future writings, courts have become a poor ally to civil rights litigants. A thicket of jurisdictional traps, immunity doctrines, standing rules, and other procedural hurdles often weed out even the most deserving civil rights plaintiffs from court. When a plaintiff is lucky enough to surmount these pitfalls and get a judge to weigh in on the merits of their claims, a fundamental misunderstanding of the role of the judiciary has led judges to defer excessively to policymakers—the very people they’re supposed to protect our rights against.

This all takes place in the name of “democracy.” Unelected and unaccountable men and women in robes, we are told, should not thwart the will of the people. But the Framers established liberty, not democracy, as the guiding principle of our Constitution. They recognized that, as Benjamin Franklin quipped, democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what’s for lunch. They therefore designed the judiciary as a counter-majoritarian bulwark against democratic excess.

So while it’s popular nowadays to say the Supreme Court wields too much power, even at its peak the judiciary is “the least dangerous” branch. It can’t make new laws. It can’t even enforce its own orders. Its only weapon is a defensive one: the power of judgment. It’s not the judiciary that’s regulating small bookstores out of business to protect the financial interests of Mark Hamill, or keeping special needs kids from getting care for its own bureaucratic convenience, or taking hundreds of thousands of dollars in home equity as punishment for the failure to pay $8 in taxes, or imposing massive fines for doing innocuous things like working on your car in your own driveway. It’s the democratic branch that is constantly “extending the sphere of its activity,” sucking all power “into its impetuous vortex,” and regulating everything from the demographic composition of corporate boards down to the graphics on a can of craft beer. The judiciary only has the power to undo those rights-violations.

But all too frequently, it doesn’t. Because democracy. Or because many judges view some rights as less deserving of protection than others. Or because the would-be plaintiff committed some obscure misstep in the kabuki-theater ritual of modern civil rights litigation. Or perhaps simply because a vast amount of judges are former government lawyers and still see the world through that lens.

Whatever the reason, that was my experience. And I decided that if civil rights plaintiffs were having so much difficulty finding a remedy in the courts after their rights were violated, maybe I was better equipped to help stop these abuses from happening in the first place.

So, how to do that? I’ve concluded that we must 1) describe the ideals animating our Constitution in a way that makes people want to defend them, and 2) get the judiciary back into the habit of judging. Both tasks require advocacy outside of the courts. Those of us who believe that the Constitution is a fundamentally libertarian document must not only convince people that it says what we believe it means, but also that its meaning is worth following.

And it is. Liberty allows people to exercise their ingenuity, to make world-changing innovations, to put food on the table by working in the profession of their choice, and to order their lives in the way that suits their own, unique needs. It allows a man with an eighth-grade education to build a small family business in Ohio so he can keep his kids and grandbabies close to home. It allows an accordionist in Houston to bring joy to passersby while earning a little extra cash for himself. It allows a woman with few means and little skills to earn money arranging flowers in a local grocery store. It allows people to escape the circumstances of their birth. There’s a reason the libertarian ideals of freedom and equality have been the rallying cry of civil rights leaders throughout history. When we erase these liberties from the Constitution—or at least subject them to a laughably low level of judicial protection—we rip the pursuit of happiness away, often from the people who need opportunity most.

In short, we have to, as Ruth Bader Ginsburg said, “fight for the things [we] care about” in a way that will “lead others to join,”­—the public, legislators, and judges included. And that’s what I intend to do in my new role at Cato.