The Death of Common Sense: How Law Is Suffocating America

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About The Death Of Common Sense: How Law Is Suffocating

Product Description NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER“We need a new idea of how to govern. The current system is broken. Law is supposed to be a framework for humans to make choices, not the replacement for free choice.” So notes Philip K. Howard in the new Afterword to his explosive manifesto The Death of Common Sense. Here Howard offers nothing less than a fresh, lucid, practical operating system for modern democracy. America is drowning—in law, lawsuits, and nearly endless red tape. Before acting or making a decision, we often abandon our best instincts. We pause, we worry, we equivocate, and then we divert our energy into trying to protect ourselves. Filled with one too many examples of bureaucratic overreach, The Death of Common Sense demonstrates how we—and our country—can at last get back on track. Review “Incendiary . . . stimulating and controversial.” —San Francisco Examiner “[Philip K.] Howard’s argument is fresh, reflecting an impressive combination of wisdom, wry humor, and quiet passion. . . . When we think about ‘reinventing government,’ it’s a good place to start.” —The New York Times Book Review “A valuable book . . . a call for personal responsibility and initiative in government.”— People   “The delights of this policy prose poem lie in its perfect details, its civilized tone, its sure sense of where the ill-made legal shoe pinches.” —The Wall Street Journal   “A brilliant diagnosis . . . forceful, trenchant, and eloquent.”—Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr.   “Excellent.” —The Washington Post About the Author Philip K. Howard is a lawyer and the author of The Death of Common Sense. He has advised leaders of both parties on legal and regulatory reform. Howard grew up in small towns in the South and is the son of a Presbyterian minister. He is a managing partner of an international law firm and lives in Manhattan with his wife. They have four children. Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. I The Death of Common Sense In the winter of 1988, nuns of the Missionaries of Charity were walking through the snow in the South Bronx in their saris and sandals to look for an abandoned building that they might convert into a homeless shelter. Mother Teresa, the Nobel Prize winner and head of the order, had agreed on the plan with Mayor Ed Koch after visiting him in the hospital several years earlier. The nuns came to two fire-gutted buildings on 148th Street and, finding a Madonna among the rubble, thought that perhaps providence itself had ordained the mission. New York City offered the abandoned buildings at one dollar each, and the Missionaries of Charity set aside $500,000 for the reconstruction. The nuns developed a plan to provide temporary care for sixty-four homeless men in a communal setting that included a dining room and kitchen on the first floor, a lounge on the second floor, and small dormitory rooms on the third and fourth floors. The only unusual thing about the plan was that Missionaries of Charity, in addition to their vow of poverty, avoid the routine use of modern conveniences. There would be no dishwashers or other appliances; laundry would be done by hand. For New York City, the proposed homeless facility would be (literally) a godsend. Although the city owned the buildings, no official had the authority to transfer them except through an extensive bureaucratic process. For a year and a half the nuns, wanting only to live a life of ascetic service, found themselves instead traveling in their sandals from hearing room to hearing room, presenting the details of the project and then discussing the details again at two higher levels of city government. In September 1989 the city finally approved the plan and the Missionaries of Charity began repairing the fire damage. Providence, however, was no match for law. New York's building code, they were told after almost two years, requires an elevator in every new or renovated multiple-story building. The Missionaries of Charity exp