Why We Can't Have Nice Things: How Legal Reformers Accidentally Broke America

A provocative account of how our legal culture is holding us hostage—and what we need to do to change it.

American government is broken. The country that built the national highway system and created Social Security and Medicare can now barely manage the basics. What went wrong?

University of Michigan Law professor Nicholas Bagley argues that America’s obsessively legalistic approach to governance—our “procedure fetish”—has strangled progress. Beginning in the late 1960s, reformers concerned ...