The Rule of Nobody: Saving America from Dead Laws and Broken Government.

• Jurisdiction: United States
• Date: 01 January 2015
• Author: Davis, J. Kennerly, Jr.

The Rule of Nobody: Saving America from Dead Laws and Broken Government

Philip K. Howard

New York: W.W. Norton, 2014, 244 pp.

Philip Howard is a lawyer nationally known for his best-selling books and extensive commentary on the dysfunctions of the American legal and political systems and the adverse effects those dysfunctions have on individual behavior and the overall workings of society.

Beginning with his 1994 best seller, The Death of Common Sense, and throughout the rest of his career, Howard has chronicled an American society buried in law and legalism, tyrannized by jackpot justice trial attorneys, and strangled in red tape; a society smothered with rules and legalistic procedures that paralyze us, prevent us from taking responsibility, and keep us from using our common sense to confront and solve our problems in order to advance the common good.

In response to these problems, Howard has called for a restoration of common sense to government based on principles of freedom, responsibility, and accountability. He has called for a sweeping simplification of government that will allow people to make sensible choices and free them from the oppressive interference of lawyers. One of Howard's books is even called Life without Lawyers. As a result of his continued focus on the widely acknowledged problems of our legal system, Howard is firmly established as a well-known legal reformer. He has spoken in a wide variety of venues, including The Daily Show with Jon Stewart. In 2002, he founded Common Good in order to better champion his reforms.

In The Rule of Nobody, Howard returns to established themes, this time with a focus on government regulation. He presents a compelling description of the dysfunctional American administrative state--strangled in red tape, beset by absurdly detailed means-and-methods regulations with check-the-box compliance requirements, bogged down in endless permitting and other administrative proceedings, and burdened with costly litigation. A thicket of law and a horde of lawyers combine to restrict freedom, obscure responsibility, undermine accountability, and sap individual initiative, thus preventing America from effectively addressing the serious problems that confront it.

Howard laments that rules dictate daily choices and that nobody has authority, or responsibility, to get things done--thus, "the rule of nobody." He underscores his point with anecdotes about sympathetic individuals trying to take responsibility and to get things done-school teachers trying to maintain classroom discipline, nursing home operators trying to provide compassionate care, an official trying to improve a port facility, and someone who just wanted to remove a fallen tree from a creek bed in his town.

Howard is certainly correct that America is strangled by red tape. What then, is the cause of this sorry...