Maybe. Tort reform and many other such ideas are always talked about, but seldom implemented. I'd love to have state legislatures convene maybe one session every two years - that would limit the deluge of laws. Also, many laws should have sunset provisions so that they come up for review and are either changed or time out.

Laissez-faire mes amis.

Seems to me that law set on precedence creates a climate of situational specification in defence. You have a simple law. Someone finds a loophole. You amend the law Someone finds another loophole. You amend the law again and again. Pretty soon you have a twisted piece of legislation that people with money to hire the sharpest minds can slip through and people with less money get caught up in.

Like we start the country over? We'd just be back to this point in another 200 years anyway.

You have simple laws and allow judges to judge each case on merit and not on precedence.

But we have precedence because it would be unfair not to, and to help to minimize the amount of personal prejudice that a judge can use in his or her ruling. Given two identical cases, two judges could come up with two totally disparate rulings...And that would be a bad thing. The only result would be that the burden of arguing the fairness of a ruling would rest more on the victim than on the principles of the court. It would be a judicial nightmare, with plaintiffs filing suits only to argue "It's not just that the ruling in my case is this, while the same situation arose two years ago and the ruling THERE was THAT." Such a system would hardly simplify things and it would allow the justice system to be reduced to the whims of individual judges.

Trust the judgement of judges. No two cases are identical and considering cases in black and white creates more miscarriages of justice than considering them with an open mind.

Unfortunately, judges are human and sometimes have inner motivations or worldviews that may potentially impact the fairness of their rulings. This happens all the time, even with the way our system works now. I can't blindly trust the judgement of all judges any more than I can blindly trust the judgement of all my neighbors. Anticipating a misuse of power and setting up checks and balances is the key to democracy, and I'm willing to put up with a little complication to keep that going.

It would just eventually lead to what we have today.