See You in Court.(Review)

The Lost Art of Drawing the Line: How Fairness Went Too Far, by Philip K. Howard (Random House, 255 pp., $22.95)

Philip K. Howard's book is a fine and important one in some ways, an unsatisfactory one in others. It tells a gruesome, hugely important story about America today. Howard is right about the problems: American society-and especially our public schools, race relations, and government bureaucracies-is in desperate trouble. He is right about the immediate cause: Crazed by power and greed, lawyers have gone ape and are holding the country hostage. He is also right about the root cause: Too many Americans are opposed to authority and morality on principle.

Consider these signs of the times: Grossly incompetent teachers are kept on forever because regulations make it all but impossible to fire them. In one Florida county during 1998, exactly 14 of 7,000 teachers got "less-than-positive" reviews. "In the federal government," writes Howard, "99.6 percent of federal employees got a rating of 'full satisfactory.'" Our bureaucrats and teachers are all outstanding, yet our government agencies and schools are in deep trouble; it's just one of those funny things. In Oologah, Okla., a playground slide is carted away because of a lawsuit; in Bristol, Conn., seesaws and merry-go- rounds are banished. For the safety of our children, we go to any lengths. Yet an injured teenager in Chicago collapses 30 feet from a hospital door and the medical staff, for fear of legal consequences, refuses to budge outside the building to help. The teenager dies.

Hamlet thought that conscience doth make cowards of us all, but today conscience has been dismissed and we are terrified of lawyers instead.

Howard shows that our government agencies work badly. The Establishment's ideas about race relations turn out to be poisonous. Our public schools have been in deep trouble for a generation. "American schools," Howard writes, "have a culture that more closely resembles that of a penal institution. The idea of politeness and respect doesn't exist, even in memory."

Underlying all this is a legal system running wild. We traded our birthright, our philosophical and religious principles, for a dime's worth of shiny new tin-plated laws and bureaucratic rulings and judicial decisions. Terrorized by the runaway legal system, too many of us suppress our better judgment-indeed (Howard insists) our very personalities-and follow the rules like frightened robots. "Schools fail because teachers can't draw on their personality and passion. Schools fail because principals can't use their judgment to distinguish the good from the indifferent . . . " We have surrendered to the lawyers our freedom to make decisions and act on them.

We are scared to exercise authority lest we be sued; to protect ourselves, we abdicate personal responsibility in favor of rules, regulations, and laws-which means (in effect) that we have abdicated in favor of bureaucrats, lawyers, and judges. "Use your best judgment" is Greek to us: We teach our children to use no judgment at all. We pretend that "not to be judgmental" is a virtue instead of a handy way to avoid lawsuits, and a cynical admission of moral cowardice and ignorance. "Bureaucracy has billowed like smoke," Howard writes, "since the due process revolution drove in the final nail sealing off judgments about people."