My Desert Lawyers

Life Without Lawyers: Restoring Responsibility in America

Description

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.

Reviews

Rating: 5 / 5
Date: 2010-03-13
Summary: "Another excellent book from Philip K Howard"

If you have read The Death of Common Sense: How Law is Suffocating America or The Collapse of the Common Good: How America's Lawsuit Culture Undermines Our Freedom, this book won't contain many surprises. Howard writes with intelligence and passion about how excessive regulation and litigation crushes civic life and makes America a worse place. His examples are well chosen, his analysis convincing, his writing clear and evocative, and his solutions vaguely unsatisfying. Perhaps in response to personal attacks he suffered after the publication of his earlier books, Howard provides more personal information in this book, describing how his father's mental illness leaves him a fierce protector of the rights of the disadvantaged.

I'd give the book four and a half stars if I could, only because Howard has effectively tackled only the easy side of the problem -- pointing out that it exists. His solutions seem inadequate or incomplete. We need leaders, perhaps a crisis will help, you should join organizations promoting changes in the way medical malpractice cases are handled, visit my website. OK, but even if every person who reads this book does everything Howard suggests, can it outweigh the natural imbalance between the inertia of large groups of people who are each hurt only slightly by a problem (and who may not perceive the problem at all) versus the large organizations that benefit from the status quo?

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Rating: 5 / 5
Date: 2010-02-22
Summary: "Life Without Lawyers"

Philip Howard is a lawyer and a leading advocate of legal reform. His two previous books, //The Death of Common Sense// and //The Collapse of the Common Good//, set the stage for this third work. Howard consistently strives to help us see that too much law suffocates rather than protects, and restricts rather than safeguards our freedoms. He argues that America's current climate of litigation strangles innovation, discovery, and human connection.

With all the legal red tape, core elements of life don't work: healthcare, education, community development, and our private quests for personal fulfillment. Howard's examples are things we have seen and know to be true: child care staff forbidden to hug a bruised child, high school principals restricted from effective discipline, playgrounds with no equipment after the merry-go-round maker was sued. Howard believes the answer is in restructure and practice, which will unleash flexibility and creativity and thus recalibrate our communities and institutions.

In //Life Without Lawyers//, Howard proposes concrete change: new structures outside the legal system to provide administration oversight and protection, new legal boundaries around reasonable risk, and new limitations on lawsuits. Howard's call is compelling and serious: he wants to be an agent of change he is calling for compatriots.

Reviewed by Marcia Jo

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Rating: 4 / 5
Date: 2009-09-23
Summary: "a refreshing non political political book"

This may be the longest 200 page book one reads. Completing 5 pages requires the reader to close the book and cogitate on the provocative insights raised by Philip Howard's third best selling book. Howard's most telling point in his attack on the proliferation of laws in American society comes in citing an English House of Lords decision rejecting the foreseeablity of negligence in a personal injury case in favor of "the social value of the activity which gives rise to the risk." Ahhh, now this is a novel thought we don't hear on this side of the Atlantic. He then goes on to write that American law ignores the protection of "our daily freedoms" as Americans. This call to legal pragmatism borders on the utopian as it ignores the law making sausage factory in our legislatures and courts especially in the regulatory age of the present administration.

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Rating: 5 / 5
Date: 2009-08-06
Summary: "America's Legal Lethal Injection"

Philip K. Howard has done it again. He has compiled another wonderful treatise of what's wrong with the legal system in America, and in the process, leaves the reader wondering if there's really anything "right" with the legal system in this country. I'm hard pressed to find much to be encouraged by; especially lately. Welcome to the "land of lawyers" whose purpose in life amounts to generating billable hours, while distorting any reasonable form of justice to suit their needs.

Essentially, Howard has accurately assessed this country as a fear-based culture; afraid to live life to the fullest, for fear of upsetting anyone or getting sued by some wacko looking to make a fast buck. It doesn't matter if a complaint is frivilous; in fact, the more inane the claim of pain, suffering & discrimination, the better.

Sadly, the pernicious nature of the American legal system has taken its toll on corporate America; that former bastion of economic progress & prosperity. It has long since slipped into the abyss of bureaucracy & risk avoidance, and in the process has taken the spirit away from its front-line employees. The result has been catastrophic; the world economic meltdown over the past year has much of its roots in the low morale/low productivity cesspool of business; big or small.

Perhaps someday, the pendulum will swing in the direction of common sense. For the sake of this country's social & economic health, let's hope that happens sooner, rather than later.

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Rating: 5 / 5
Date: 2009-06-25
Summary: "Comprehensive and easy to understand"

An easy to understand treatise on tort law, education law, goverment bureaucracy as related to law...a good book for we lay people. An easy
but comprehensive read.