Philip K. Howard, a graduate of Taft prep school, Yale and the University of Virginia School of Law, says he never wore “white bucks.” This 1950s campus fashion waned before he matriculated. Those buckskin shoes were popular among young blades destined to become “white-shoe lawyers” at prestigious “white-shoe law firms,” such as Covington & Burling, where Howard, 76, is senior counsel.

He also is a genteel inveigher against the coagulation of American society, which is saturated with law. In his new book “Saving Can-Do: How to Revive the Spirit of America,” he argues that law’s proper role is preventing transgressions by authorities, not micromanaging choices so minutely that red tape extinguishes individual responsibility and the social trust that individualism engenders.

This brief, accessible and powerfully persuasive book assesses the symptoms of our ailing polity and concludes that we are suffering from a widespread loss of agency, the lifeblood of any free society.

That loss begins and ends with a lack of trust. Some mid-20th-century activists and regulators worried that both government and the private sector in America were running needless risks that endangered individual rights and public health and safety. So they set about constraining the range of choices available to private and public decision makers, replacing individual discretion with legal frameworks that would make uncertain tradeoffs less necessary. “The post-1960s complex of rules, processes, and rights,” Mr. Howard argues, “has been designed with one overriding operational premise—to preempt human judgment.”