Exit Lawyers.(The Talk of the Town)(Philip Howard on 'Life Without Lawyers')

One recent evening, Philip Howard appeared before an audience at the New-York Historical Society, on Central Park West, where Herman Melville once lectured on the South Sea Islands, and James Fenimore Cooper discussed the Battle of Plattsburgh Bay, to talk about his new book, "Life Without Lawyers," with Sir Harold Evans, the author and the former president of Random House. In the crowd was a mixture of civil libertarians, Howard relatives (including Alexandra Schlesinger, Arthur's widow, who is Howard's wife's first cousin), students from John Jay College, who were reading Howard's 1994 best-seller, "The Death of Common Sense," and, yes, lawyers.

"I could sue you tonight for humiliating me," Evans noted at the outset, "by displaying greater intelligence than I have!"

"Truth is a defense," Howard replied.

"That's defamation straightaway!" Evans declared.

Howard, who is sixty, sat balanced lightly on the edge of his chair (he is a longtime yogi), his long legs coiled under him, looking poised for action. He is tall and slim, and his silver-haired, senatorial head was inclined slightly, in that agreeable Jimmy Stewart way. Wearing a perfectly knotted tie that some say he sleeps in, a dark-navy suit, black shoes, and an elegant but not fancy watch, he looked every inch the establishmentarian. But actually he is the son of a Presbyterian minister from rural Kentucky and was plucked from humble circumstances after J.F.K. "discovered Appalachia," as he put it, in 1962. He was sent on a scholarship to the Taft School, "which was like being sent to Mars," and from there won a scholarship to Yale, where "life really began." After moving to Manhattan, he married into a prominent New York family (the Cushings), began his career as a corporate lawyer (today, he is a partner at the firm of Covington & Burling), and devoted himself to preserving urban landmarks and sharing his good fortune with those less fortunate than he. For the past ten years, he has been the chairman of the Municipal Art Society, where he has earned a reputation as a man who knows how to get things done.

After Evans set the tone by informing audience members of all the things they were not allowed to do during the next hour--"no spitting, no talking, no cell phones, no frowning, no smiling (except when a joke is intended), no coughing, no touching"--Howard laid out the gist of his book's argument. Americans face a crisis of authority, one brought on not by too few rules but by too many. These rules, he suggested, are a by-product of the "rights revolution," which began in the sixties and has led to the ...