Judges are elected in many states.
Rewrite the laws to make them understandable by laymen, and get rid of law schools.
Most of "the laws" consist of the body of experience and tradition which exists in a community, as represented through past decisions of judges (in some cases, stretching back hundreds of years). If you leave a banana peel on your front doorstep and somebody trips and sues you, they don't sue you under the Banana Peel Law which exists in a book somewhere - they sue you under the tradition in your state that people shouldn't leave things lying around where they know others can trip over them. This is called the "common law" - the body of tradition. Laws which the legislature has ever actually passed are called "statutes". Most law (more or less) is common law, because the legislature would have its hands full trying to pass "The People Should Look Where They Are Going Act", the "Banana Peels Are Bright Yellow And People Should Be Expected To Notice Them Act", etc. This is why you can't simply "rewrite" the laws - most of it wasn't deliberately "written" to begin with, and in any case there's simply too much.
The system of precedence and review of laws is out of date, and probably is anathema to a free society.
The point of precedent is that a judge, when trying to figure out what the traditional rule is, obviously first tries to find out what everybody before him did. If it's flat-out never come up before, or if times have changed so much that the old rule would lead to a crazy result, he takes a stab at making a new one based on the closest available cases. If the legislature doesn't like the result, they can pass a statute - basically overwriting the tradition - and giving a hard-and-fast rule for future judges to apply.
Why should there be a law against leaving things laying around? The guy should have watched where he was going. Having the law does not make society safer, but having a means of suing to get money back in a civil court does. Why should there be criminal law when civil law works better? We don't need law schools and lawyers to have common sense applied in a civil case with a jury of peers and a reasonably intelligent judge.
I know that my ideas are to be considered whacky, but the system of law that we have is worse than whacky, it is corrupt and easily corruptible.
And then the judges will just rule it unconstitutional, and go back to business as usual....
Judicial activism is what is ruining this country.