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71 Nw. U. L. Rev. 767 (1976-1977)
Hyperlexis: Our National Disease

handle is hein.journals/illlr71 and id is 775 raw text is: Copyright 1977 by Northwestern University School of Law Printed in U.S.A. Northwestern University Law Review Vol. 71, No. 6 HYPERLEXIS: OUR NATIONAL DISEASE* Bayless Manning** Hyperlexis sounds like some sort of serious disabling illness. It is. Hyperlexis is America's national disease-the pathological condition caused by an overactive law-making gland. Measured by any and every index, our law is exploding. New statutes, regulations, and ordinances are increasing at geometric rates at all levels of government. The same is true of reported decisions by courts and administrative agencies. Whole new legal fields spring into being overnight, such as environmental law; older fields like real property are experiencing infinite fission. Statutory codes, such as those in the fields of commercial law and taxation, are becoming ever more particularistic, longer, more complex, and less comprehensible. We are drowning in law. Our situation is aggravated by the wind of legal commentary set off by the firestorm of law. Law has always been one of the garrulous professions, and modern communications gadgetry makes it all too easy to record, reproduce, and distribute legal words. As in the wake of a great ship mewing seagulls follow, so legal commentators pursue the society's law-making machines, squabbling over the newly emitted material. Our law libraries are swamped, our citizenry is confounded by the legal blizzard, and our imperilled forest reserves are further depleted. INCAPACITATIONS Granted that we are awash with law, is it cause for any serious concern? Is hyperlexis a critically disabling disease or merely a nuisance? The answer is that it has already done a great deal of harm to the American body politic, and if it continues, it will incapacitate us in a number of different ways. First, though not first in importance, is simple dollar cost. What does it cost to operate our elaborate institutional machinery of federal, state, and local courts, prosecutors, bailiffs, investigators, administrative agencies, police, examiners, lawyers, law schools, legal aid programs, law publishers, correctional facilities, etc.? We have no data on the * This article is based in part on a speech delivered by the author before the Chicago Law Club on November 4, 1976. ** President, Council on Foreign Relations, Inc., New York, New York; former Dean, Stanford Law School.

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