Why We Can't Have Nice Things
How Legal Reformers Accidentally Broke America
1 December 2026
Territory Rights — Worldwide including Canada, Singapore and Malaysia, but excluding the British Commonwealth.
Description
A provocative account of how our legal culture is holding us hostage—and what we need to do to change it.
American government is broken. The country that built the national highway system and created Social Security and Medicare can now barely manage the basics. What went wrong?
University of Michigan Law professor Nicholas Bagley argues that America’s obsessively legalistic approach to governance—our “procedure fetish”—has strangled progress. Beginning in the late 1960s, reformers concerned about reckless postwar development crafted rules and procedures to minimize social and environmental harm from government action. These reformers had the best of intentions. Their obsession, however, has now grown into a legal regime that prioritizes process over outcomes, stasis over progress, and lawsuits over results. It’s time to stop assuming that well-intentioned procedures are good because they’re well-intentioned, and instead think hard about how to make our institutions genuinely effective. With deep insider knowledge, incisive analysis, and fluid storytelling, Why We Can’t Have Nice Things identifies a fatal flaw in American governance—and our potential path forward.
Reviews
"Nick Bagley taught me everything I know about the lawyerly society. This book will reveal how our lives have been governed by aging hippies, entrenched interests, and their judicial handmaidens. And it will invigorate Americans to ask whether they must obsess over procedures and legalisms — or whether they can still get things done." — Dan Wang, New York Times-bestselling author of Breakneck
"Bagley makes sense of the senseless. Anyone trying to understand how American government broke, and how to fix it, should read this book. And the great surprise is how much you'll enjoy it. Bagley makes a maddening topic a delight to explore!" — Jennifer Pahlka, author of Recoding America
"A vivid, powerful, and passionate attack on processes and barriers that slow everything down - and that end up burdening government and the private sector alike. Important reading for all those who want a better future. " — Cass R. Sunstein, Robert Walmsley University Professor, Harvard Law School, and author, Sludge: What Stops Us from Getting Things Done and What to Do about It
"We're used to thinking about the law and lawyers as mechanisms for government. Nick Bagley shows how, in the real world, they can do the opposite. Law and lawyers have been weaponized to subvert good government and to keep government from delivering the public goods. Yet, at a time when government is in need of serious reforms so that it can meet people's needs, Bagley provides some reason for optimism--that maybe, just maybe, we can have nice things after all." — Leah Litman, Professor of Law at the University of Michigan Law School and New York Times-bestselling author of Lawless