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2 Whittier L. Rev. 469 (1979-1980)
Delegalizing Society

handle is hein.journals/whitlr2 and id is 489 raw text is: DELEGALIZING SOCIETY* SENATOR EDWARD M. KENNEDY** Law and lawsuits are multiplying even faster than lawyers. From 1970 to 1977, the number of civil suits each year increased by fifty percent. At current rates of growth, over a million cases a year will flood the federal appellate courts within the next three decades. In the State of California alone, four times as many suits are filed each year as in the entire federal system. Yet legal aid programs do not begin to meet the needs of the poor. The middle class too often finds itself priced out of the system. And even those who can afford to seek justice must frequently wait years or spend a fortune to find it. If the rule of law is to flourish in our society in the future, reforms will be required in the years ahead. Tradition should not stand in the way of progress. Question- ing, as Justice Jackson once wrote, is an indispensable instrumen- tality of justice. Venerable institutions have a way of becoming vulnerable if they try to immunize themselves from questioning and from the inevitability of change. The first essential step is to reduce the excessive laws and regula- tions that threaten to suffocate the rule of law itself. Too many citi- zens today find themselves swamped by the complexity of the forms they must use; businesses flounder in a sea of paperwork. We have regulation piled upon regulation and laws added where they ought to be subtracted. Our lives and our economy are increasingly caught up, not in the seamless web of the law, but in the spider's web of regulation and bureaucracy. We must undertake a concerted effort to streamline our legal system in order to achieve greater justice with less formal legalism. While deregulation is not the answer in every area, it is the an- * This is the text of a speech given to a joint meeting of the Los Angeles County and Beverly Hills Bar Associations and Public Counsel of Los Angeles in Los Angeles, California on November 30, 1979 (Senator Kennedy's opening remarks have been deleted). ** United States Senator from Massachusetts.

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