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LIFE WITHOUT LAWYERS
Liberating Americans from Too Much Law
By Philip K. Howard
“Sometimes I wonder how it came to this,” a teacher in Wyoming asked, “where teachers no longer have authority to run the classroom and parents are afraid to go on field trips for fear of being sued.”
The land of the free has become a legal minefield. People sue for anything. A man sues his laundry for $54 million for losing his pants. There’s a rule for everything; doctors are scared to use a patient’s name for fear of violating privacy laws. A legal mindset has infected daily dealings: 78 percent of middle and high school teachers in America say they have been threatened with lawsuits or claims of violating rights—by their students.
This encroaching legal culture, as noted lawyer and best-selling author Philip K. Howard describes in his new book, LIFE WITHOUT LAWYERS [W. W. Norton & Company; January 12, 2009; $24.95 hardcover], has undermined Americans’ freedom in their daily choices. The cost is not only personal frustration but also the pervasive failure of our public institutions and a corrosion of America’s can-do spirit. It is basically impossible to fix schools, healthcare, or government, Howard argues, until people with responsibility are liberated to use their common sense—so that teachers can maintain order in the classroom and doctors can avoid squandering billions in defensive medicine.
What’s needed is a dramatic spring cleaning of American law and regulation. Until then, even Washington will remain paralyzed by decades of accumulated law and rights.
“What is needed is not a reform but a quiet revolution,” writes Howard. “This shift in approach is not about changing our goals—almost everyone I know wants a clean environment, safe workplaces, good schools, competent doctors, and laws against discrimination. The challenge is to liberate humans to accomplish these goals. This requires a sharp turn away from current legal conventions—nearly endless rules and rights designed to avoid decisions by people with responsibility—toward law that restores free exercise of judgment at every level of responsibility. We must remake our legal structures so that Americans are free again to make sense of everyday choices.”
LIFE WITHOUT LAWYERS is an intelligently argued, thought-provoking look at our current legal quagmire, with examples familiar to every reader confronted daily with legal fears and overbearing rules.
And what LIFE WITHOUT LAWYERS delivers, without polemics or politicking, is a definitive way forward, an agenda for change based on core principles regarding the structure of freedom—“a wake-up call from one of America’s finest public minds,” in the words of former Senator Bill Bradley. Newt Gingrich calls the book “a must-read inspirational vision of a system where freedom, decision-making, and judgment are restored to the individual.”
“The vision of a society in which people can make a difference is not hard to conceive—where teachers take back control of classrooms, judges draw boundaries, and the rest of us are invested in these and other public choices,” writes Howard. “This project, of historic dimension, is worth the effort. It is how we will take control of our future. It is how we become confident again. Liberating America’s can-do spirit will work miracles.”
Clear, cogent, and concise in setting out a broad and workable solution, LIFE WITHOUT LAWYERS will serve as the guidebook for this essential revolution—a revolution that will return responsibility to individuals and bring clarity to an endless legal tangle that virtually guarantees personal frustration and failure of our social institutions.
About the Author
Philip K. Howard, a lawyer, advises leaders of both parties on legal and regulatory reform. He is chair of Common Good (http://www.commongood.org) and a contributor to the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal.
TITLE: LIFE WITHOUT LAWYERS: Liberating Americans from Too Much Law
AUTHOR: Philip K. Howard
PUBLICATION DATE: January 12, 2009
PAGES: 224 pages
ISBN: 978-0-393-06566-4
PRICE: $24.95 hardcover