Life Without Lawyers: Restoring Responsibility in America [Paperback]

Philip K. Howard (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: February 1, 2010

How to restore the can-do spirit that made America great, from the author of the best-selling The Death of Common Sense.

Americans are losing the freedom to make sense of daily choices—teachers can’t maintain order in the classroom, managers are trained to avoid candor, schools ban tag, and companies plaster inane warnings on everything: “Remove Baby Before Folding Stroller.”

Philip K. Howard’s urgent argument is full of examples, often darkly humorous. He describes the historical and cultural forces that led to this mess and lays out the basic shift in approach needed to fix it. Today we are flooded with legal threats that prevent us from taking responsibility. We must rebuild boundaries of law that protect an open field of freedom. The voices here will ring true to every reader. The analysis is powerful, and the solution unavoidable. What’s at stake, Howard explains in this seminal book, is the vitality of American culture.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

In his latest prescriptive survey of American law abuse and its consequences, Howard (The Death of Common Sense, The Collapse of the Common Good) sticks to the formula: one ghastly anecdote after another demonstrating how the justice system hinders freedom and confounds Americans who simply want to do the right thing. Either through litigation or the fear of it, Howard argues, we've ceded our everyday decision-making to the lawyers (we "might as well give a legal club to the most unreasonable and selfish person in the enterprise") resulting in everything from "no running on the playground" signs to a 5-year-old handcuffed at school by police; from diminishing health care quality and spiraling costs to doctors afraid of discussing treatments among themselves over email. Chair of nonpartisan advocacy organization Common Good, Howard has a great deal of knowledge and a catalog of abuses that will elicit fury and despair. For the third time in some 15 years, Howard agitates for change by asking "How did the land of freedom become a legal minefield?"; in this time of financial depression and political hope, Howard may have found the perfect moment to sound his alarm.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

Review

“Surely will be 2009’s most needed book on public affairs.” (Washington Post )

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Product Details

• Paperback: 225 pages
• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company (February 1, 2010)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0393338037
• ISBN-13: 978-0393338034
• Product Dimensions: 5.5 x 0.6 x 8.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (20 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #278,568 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Philip K. Howard, a lawyer, advises leaders of both parties on legal and regulatory reform. He is chair of Common Good and a contributor to the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal.

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

47 of 50 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars True freedom requires a less litigious society January 12, 2009

By K. M. VINE™ VOICE

Format:Hardcover

In 1995 Phillip K. Howard's The Death of Common Sense: How Law is Suffocating America aroused so much interest that it became a bestseller. Fourteen years later, has our society heeded the call to become less litigious? Have we opted for more common sense approaches? Sadly, no -- leaving the path open for further coverage of our accelerating tendency to abandon sensible freedom of action for the false "safety" of reams of rules, due process and litigation. In Life Without Lawyers: Liberating Americans from Too Much Law Howard reminds us of how imbalanced, fearful and nonsensical our society has become with a multitude of legal cases, news stories, and statistics and studies. Among the outrageous occurrences: a five-year-old child being taken away in handcuffs by police because her school forbade any teacher or the principal from restraining her when she threw a tantrum. Another: a Catholic archdiocese that was ordered by a jury to pay $17 million to a paralyzed plaintiff because the Church volunteer who caused the accident had no deep pockets. Also: the city fathers who chopped down three mature hickory trees at the demand of a couple with a child allergic to nuts. To name a few.

Life Without Lawyers: Liberating Americans from Too Much Law main body consists of eight chapters:

1. The Boundaries of the Law
2. The Freedom to Take Risks
3. The Authority to Be Fair
4. The Boundaries of Lawsuits
5. Bureaucracy Can't Teach
6. The Freedom to Judge Others
7. Responsibility in Washington
8. The Freedom to Make a Difference

Howard then offers an "Agenda for Change" with eight suggestions. Among them are:

- "Replace the vocabulary of rights with the goal of balance.

- Restore the authority of judges to draw legal boundaries so that people have confidence justice will be reliable.
- Decentralize public services to the extent feasible. Citizenship requires active involvement in the community."

Howard's many cogent points include the need for applying discrimination laws to groups only, not individuals; for withdrawing due process procedures from schools and businesses to allow for more elastic decision making and less paperwork; for demanding accountability in both the private and public sectors (especially in Washington D.C.); for reviving our proprietary participation in our country rather than settling for being passive and apathetic consumers. He reminds us that a certain level of risk is part of being alive and the goal of seeking to eliminate risk as radically as we have actually contributes to a mediocre society. He warns against a culture that wants to gear everything to the lowest common denominator and that inhibits the freedom of large numbers of people due to complaints of one or a few.

Life Without Lawyers: Liberating Americans from Too Much Law ought to be read and its proposals implemented. It is time for substantive change. It is time we citizens got actively involved and changed the bad habits our country has acquired. Let true freedom (and accompanying personal responsibility) spread!

Also, check out lifewithoutlawyers.com where, among other things, you can contact the author with your own anecdotes or ideas.

22 of 24 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Short but insightful February 6, 2009

By D. Curtis

Format:Hardcover

This excellent book explains how excessive litigation has lead to excessive caution. Frightened individuals and institutions adapt their decisions and actions to avoid potential lawsuits, undermining our economy and our free society. Three especially interesting insights I got from this book were:

1. Sometimes the ability to anticipate and prevent a bad outcome should not be enough to establish liability for that outcome. The social value of an activity in which a risk inherently resides may outweigh the cost of that risk. For example, the few but inevitable accidents on school playgrounds have lead to lawsuits, which have compelled many schools to ban running at recess or eliminate playground equipment altogether. Kids should not be deprived of healthy and developmentally necessary play to prevent accidents that are few and far between.

2. Due process, once used to prevent the coercive power of the state from being abused, has been extended to institutions like schools and businesses, eviscerating the authority that individuals need to run their institutions. Teachers can no longer maintain order in most public schools, as their ability to discipline students is highly restricted and students know they won't be held accountable.

3. Objective rules cannot replace discretion and judgment. Most of human life is just too complex to be reduced to rules and regulation. There must be room for intuition and creativity, and in every institution some individuals must have the authority to make judgments. Out of fear and distrust of authority we have attempted to eliminate all discretion with rules, which instead has lead to stultifying bureaucracy and a decline in personal responsibility.

The book is sometimes not as rigorous as I would have liked, often relying on examples and anecdotes where I would have liked to see comprehensive data. Howard often writes that "many studies show", and although there is a bibliography, there are no footnotes to refer the reader to those specific studies. But these issues are minor compared to the strength of the book as a whole.

13 of 14 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Insightful March 29, 2009

By Robert McAvoy

Format:Hardcover

Philip Howard has written a clear, compelling, and insightful commentary on the impact that we can now associate with the highjacking of the Black Liberation Movement in the U.S. With seventy percent of the U.S. population now members of a protected class, we have devolved into a political community where Ç pluribus Unum (from many one) has been reinterpreted to mean one from many. We don't celebrate what unites us so much as we, with the help of the legal class, use what divides us to extort value from our treasury of social capital.

I recommend that you read Howard's "The Death of Common Sense" in order to understand how the U.S. Judicial System has been complicit, if not instrumental in the highjacking. You may conclude with me that tort reform drains energy from a more fundamental reform that should demand judges who judge, arguing that individual responsbility and accountability is more important than class extortion.