By: E. Donald Elliott

Today, while the media is full of stories of partisan bickering, it is important to remind ourselves that sensible reforms of law and policy are still possible. This article describes one such success story in which the system worked. Along the way, I try to draw out the lessons of why this story has a happy ending in the hope that others may be able to learn from it and duplicate these successes elsewhere.

The story begins with a true American hero, Philip K. Howard. Howard is the “policy entrepreneur” who founded a bipartisan NGO, Common Good, to try to improve our legal system.

That’s the first lesson that I learned in my 50 years in Washington — every successful reform needs a sponsor, someone who is committed to seeing it through thick and thin over the years that it takes to get things done.

As far as I can tell, Howard had no ax to grind, except perhaps the laudable desire for personal satisfaction and reputation that comes from making the world a better place. Howard had the advantage of being a best-selling author of five books about practical legal reform. One of them, The Rule of Nobody (2014), begins with the story of the attempt to raise the roadway of the Bayonne Bridge so that the new generation of larger ships could access the port of Newark, the largest port on the East Coast. The project had no appreciable adverse environmental effect because an official at the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey came up with the brilliant idea of simply raising the roadway using the existing bridge supports, which meant there would be virtually no disruption of the environment. Nonetheless, the permitting and environmental reviews under the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) took almost five years, with an environmental assessment of 10,000 pages and 47 permits from 19 government agencies, thereby delaying this vital project and dramatically increasing its cost.

Read the full article here.