Philip K. Howard Calls for Legal Overhaul in The Washington Post
December 13, 2010
Writing the lead op-ed in December 12’s The Washington Post Outlook section, Philip K. Howard proposes that every law Congress enacts should expire after ten or 15 years. “A healthy democracy must make fresh choices,” he writes. “Such a universal sunset provision would force Congress and the president to justify the status quo and give political reformers an opening to reexamine trade-offs and public priorities.” Howard also calls for the radical simplification of law, writing: “The current convention of law-as-instruction-manual suffers the idiocies of central planning, forcing everyone to go through the day with their noses in rule books instead of using their common sense.” Howard concludes his piece by quoting Thomas Jefferson, who famously argued that small revolutions from time to time were “a medicine necessary for the sound health of government.” A movement for legal overhaul, Howard writes, “is the medicine that America very much needs today.” You can read the full op-ed here.
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