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How to revive a can-do suggestion which done America great, from a writer of a best-selling The Death of Common Sense. Americans have been losing a leisure to have clarity of every day choices—teachers can’t say sequence in a classroom, managers have been lerned to equivocate candor, schools anathema tag, as well as companies smear nonsensical warnings upon everything: “Remove Baby Before Folding Stroller.”
Philip K. Howard’s obligatory evidence is full of examples, mostly darkly humorous. He describes a chronological as well as informative forces which led to this disaster as well as lays out a simple change in proceed indispensable to repair it. Today you have been flooded with authorised threats which forestall us from receiving responsibility. We mus… More >>
Life Without Lawyers: Restoring Responsibility in America
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Schools ban the game of tag, doctors waste billions on defensive medicine, etc. We are flooded with rules and legal threats that prevent us from taking responsibility. The Federal Register grows by 70,000-some pages each year.
Basic problem involves balancing each others’ rights – eg. the right for children to play outside (requiring removing large nut trees from the median), vs. neighbors that enjoy the view and shade.
Howard already covered this topic in “The Death of Common Sense,” and “The Collapse of the Common Good.” Getting old.
Author and lawyer Philip Howard continues his assault on our over-litigated nation in this thoughtful and philosophical book.
One touchstone vignette he uses is the $50 million lawsuit a by a Washington DC plaintiff who sued a Korean family dry cleaner business because his dress pants were not ready on time. Judges are too timid to dismiss such ridiculous clams at early stages, rendering the court system an all too common laughingstock.
Howard also decries the bureaucratic handcuffs that shackle many modern teachers in the US educational system.
This book, while short, is a demanding read by a modern day legal philosopher who beckons a return to common sense in place of thousands of rules governing all aspects of our lives today.
This is a super book and should be read by all politians, school teachers, principals, doctors and more.
This book is a must read! Many of the problems we deal with as a society are directly related to our legal system. The pendulum has swung too far in the favor of lawyers and judges and a system that is grinding our schools and businesses to a halt. What ever happened to “common sense”.
Highly recommended for everyone.
The author tries to draw a middle line between both possible extremes: those who want to secure their right to sue when thought injured and those who are just bystanders and get to “pay” for the misfortunes/injustices of others.
Too mild, too soft. The author could have given a lot more details about cases he knows, since he has inside information in Washington, but he “‘d rather not tell”. I little more plain talk would have been better. The first thing I noticed about America when I arrived was how legalistic the whole society was. A huge difference from Hispanic peoples: we have corruptions and dictators, laws are unenforceable, the real law is the local “cacique” (chief). In America laws are indeed enforceable, and here lies the terror of crazy laws.