AN ORGY OF LAW-MAKING.
With five thousand Bills already introduced and four or five times that number anticipated before the session ends, Con- gress is again running true to form in its zeal for adding to the already overwhelming mass of American law. Similarly with the State Legislatures, which this year alone have enacted another 16,900 odd laws. As what one authority calls this " orgy of law-making " goes on, protests from harassed lawyers, judges and the public multiply. With some 2,400,000 laws—Federal, State and Municipal—dealing with almost every activity of human life, the United States, one critic declares, has more law and more lawlessness than any nation in the world. The connexion between law-making and law-breaking is not hard to seek. Several remedies have been proposed, most of them impracticable. There does, however, seem to be both sound sense and practicability in the suggestion which is gaining ground that Legislatures should hold special sessions for the express purpose not of making laws but of repealing the enormous number which have become obsolete and unneces- sary. The idea has had recent support from the President of the American Bar Association and Governor Byrd of Virginia, among others. As Governor Byrd says, its adoption would be unlikely to impair good morals or order in the slightest. On the contrary, it would be likely to increase the respect of citizens for those laws which are necessary.
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