I think the size of our regulatory institutions are, within an order of magnitude, consistent with the needs of our enormous and complex society. Within that scope, I would favor codifying less and leaving more to the discretion of regulatory bodies. That would lead to a reduction in the volume of law in trade for an accretion of power in regulatory bodies. I think dramatic reductions in the scope of regulation would lead to diminished prosperity. I don't think there is a practical way to reduce the volume of law while holding both variables constant.
So in short, I don't think we have an "excess" of law, at least not within an order of magnitude. It's hard to argue with success--America and England are the two most legalistic societies in the history of the world, and are also the two most successful. I think the scope of their regulatory institutions should get some credit for that success, a basic enabler of highly complex, integrated, organized, specialized industrial society.
As an aside, consider something like the internet. The internet has a lot of "law": Ethernet, LTE, TCP/IP, HTML, CSS, JS, DOC, PDF, SMTP, POP, etc. And that's just for the relatively simple task of exchanging two dimensional mostly textual documents! Nobody implements all these correctly, but would the internet be as successful without them?
Fundamentally, we need some people telling everyone what to do and how to do it. At some level. You can't build the world we live in without that. There are various ways to do it, but law is how you do it in a mostly democratic manner.
And it is probably worth looking through the laws for instances where consensus-based processes like that could, perhaps not eliminate, but move some of the complexity from the regulatory system where it serves as a trap for the unwary into voluntary standards that work because it's in everyone's interest to follow them.
At the same time, you can still have a set of guidelines and issue warnings (but not penalties) for violations so that people will have notice that if the evil the guidelines are intended to prevent occurs as a result of their violation they'll be responsible for it. Sort of like a compiler warning. But if no evil results because you're doing something sensible but merely unanticipated, or because you've taken some alternative precautions with similar effectiveness, then no penalty would attach as long as no evil occurs.
This approach probably works best where the consequences of a violation don't involve risk of physical harm. Allowing a certain amount of risk of economic harm that the perpetrator is required to compensate for or be punished for causing in the event it occurs is much more palatable than the same when the risk is physical injury, because economic harm can be perfectly compensated for or insured against in ways that physical injury obviously can't.
It's a counter example in the context of a discussion about alternative ways to enforce (or not) rules, but not in a discussion about the complexity of the rules themselves.
As for enforcement, I agree it's interesting to look at examples of cooperative processes, but a relevant distinction is that breaking rules on the internet don't usually have consequences to other people. When they do, we do get calls to "enforce" the rules, e.g. in the context of net neutrality.
