In 2019, Bagley published an incendiary article in the Michigan Law Review, which he later turned into a policy paper for the Niskanen Center. “The Procedure Fetish” argued that something had gone wrong inside government, inside liberalism, inside Bagley’s own profession. Liberal legalism—and through it, liberal government—had become process-obsessed rather than outcomes-oriented. It had convinced itself that the state’s legitimacy would be earned through compliance with an endless catalog of rules and restraints rather than through getting things done for the people it claimed to serve.
