Laws that Run Amuck

As America struggles to understand the Lewinsky affair, there's a natural temptation to make sense of the drama by reducing it to a clash between individual heroes and villains. And so we have a parade of soap-opera caricatures--the overzealous and partisan prosecutor, the lusty young temptress, the bloodless wife, the philandering husband--all competing for blame in the public eye.

But the real villains in the current crisis are bad laws, rather than bad women or bad men. In particular, the explosive collision of sexual-harassment doctrine and the Independent Counsel Act, combined with the erosion of legal protections for privacy, has led...