“It will be of little avail to the people that the laws are made by men
of their own choice if the laws be so voluminous that they cannot be read, or so
incoherent that they cannot be understood . . . .”
—James Madison, Federalist 62
In support of the federal Constitution, James Madison explained that “It will be of little avail to the people that the laws are made by men of their own choice if the laws be so voluminous that they cannot be read, or so incoherent that they cannot be understood.”1 Mr. Madison understood law “to be a rule of action,” and asked, “but how can that be a rule, which is little known, and less fixed?”2 Today, more than two centuries later, Mr. Madison’s warning has proven both prescient and forgotten. With federal bills and statutes droning on for hundreds and thousands of inscrutable pages of legal jargon, federal legislation has grown so voluminous (more…)
