Life Without Lawyers

Philip K. Howard joins Dennis McCuistion to discuss the flaws of the legal system today.  Philip K. Howard is the Founder and Chair of Common Good, a nonpartisan national coalition dedicated to restoring common sense to America.  He is the author of Collapse of Common Good: How America’s Lawsuit Culture Undermines Our Freedom and Death of Common Sense: How Law Is Suffocating America.

Philip K. Howard, whose purpose is to simplify government, wrote the forward to Al Gore’s Common Sense Government. He has worked with OSHA on safety regulations and assuring that safety plans and regulations for companies make sense and real people can abide by them. He states that people don’t act sensibly. From teachers to doctors, he discusses the need to change the rules so teachers can teach and doctors can doctor, without the restrictions that impose higher costs and inflationary standards.  He continues on and addresses how schools are drowning in law, demonstrating his point via a three foot long flow chart, what a school must go through to suspend a student. All in all, a simple process that took minutes now takes several months. Host Dennis McCuistion comments, “When I was a kid if I didn’t listen to the teacher, I got paddled in school and doubly at home.”

Not today, cautions Philip Howard: “We thought that to correct real abuses we would guarantee fairness. Kids today are trained that they have rights… 78% of teachers have been threatened with lawsuits. It’s a reflection of the corrosion of authority.”

He claims that there is something seriously wrong with our legal system: “Politics trump common sense and partisanship.”

Philip K. Howard, a practicing lawyer himself, lays a practical game plan to restore our country to sense and individual responsibility, the premise of our Constitution.

As always, thank you for watching as we talk about things that matter… with people who care.

Niki Nicastro McCuistion
Executive Producer/Producer

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1820 – 04.25.10