Speaker: Philip K. Howard
Where: Milwaukee Athletic Center
Time: 12:00pm
Cost: $25/at the door for those without reservations (go to http://fswi.blogspot.com/2009/03/philip-howard-life-without-lawyers.html to make reservations)

Philip K. Howard, Founder and Chair, is the author of The Death of Common Sense: How Law is Suffocating America (Random House 1995) and The Collapse of the Common Good: How America’s Lawsuit Culture Undermines Our Freedom (Ballantine 2002). He is a periodic contributor to the op-ed pages of The New York Times and the Wall Street Journal and speaks before judicial, government, and professional organizations around the country. In the Oxford Companion To American Law, Howard contributed the section on American law since 1968. He is the Vice-Chairman of Covington & Burling and a prominent civic leader in New York.

Howard has advised leaders of both parties on reform initiatives. He was special advisor to the Securities and Exchange Commission on regulatory simplification, worked on environmental and management reforms with Vice President Al Gore’s reinventing government program, advised the Republican leadership on regulatory reform, and worked on overhauling civil service and other bureaucratic institutions with several governors, including Zell Miller in Georgia, Bill Weld in Massachusetts and Jeb Bush and Lawton Chiles in Florida.

Howard grew up in small towns in the south, the son of a Presbyterian minister. He was a scholarship student at Taft School, Yale College and the University of Virginia Law School. Howard lives in Manhattan with his wife and four children.

His new book is entitled “LIFE WITHOUT LAWYERS: Liberating Americans from Too Much Law.” Here is the blurb from his publisher’s website:

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 the game of tag, and companies plaster inane warnings on everything: “Remove Baby Before Folding Stroller.”

Philip K. Howard’s urgent and elegant argument is full of examples, often darkly humorous. He describes the historical and cultural forces that led to this mess, and he lays out the basic shift in approach needed to fix it. Today we are flooded with rules and legal threats that prevent us from taking responsibility and using our common sense. We must rebuild boundaries of law that affirmatively protect an open field of freedom. The stories 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.
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The Federalist Society for Law and Public Policy Studies is a group of conservatives and libertarians interested in the current state of the legal order. It is founded on the principles that the state exists to preserve freedom, that the separation of governmental powers is central to our Constitution, and that it is emphatically the province and duty of the judiciary to say what the law is, not what it should be. The Society seeks both to promote an awareness of these principles and to further their application through its activities.