ABSTRACT
The legal system as a whole exhibits a marked tendency to become more complex, a feature that it appears to share with other systems, physical and social. In the case of the law, this tendency is certainly not inexorable, as the replacement of writ pleading with much simpler code pleading and the replacement of tort law in the workplace with workers' compensation systems demonstrate. Many legal norms evolved from relatively precise, acontextual, determinate, and hard-edged forms to relatively ambiguous, contextual, indeterminate, and open-ended ones. A legal landscape in any complex of rulemaking engenders several kinds of governance costs that have generally been overlooked. There is ample evidence of delegitimation costs in fields other than tax. Legal complexity can help legislators avoid collective action problems that a simpler law might well exacerbate. A large number of far-reaching simplification reform proposals in the area of public law involve deregulation.
