We Americans are surrounded by law: it is hard to take a step without tripping over it.

For the past decade, I have poked around our legal landscape looking for unexploded ordnance, and found ever more weird and wonderful forms of it: from patent rights that swell into mushroom clouds that engulf whole industries, to the minefield of worker rights, where jokes and compliments can blow the boss's foot off; to the cyber-frontier, where imaginary sexual encounters can detonate in court.