Howard also argues that if we could just get rid of the web of laws and regulations that constricts us, the great untapped reserves of accountability and personal responsibility would flourish once more. In a column he wrote last week in "The Wall Street Journal,"Howard wrote that "accountability, not law, is the key to responsibility." Yet which lawyer has been held accountable for what amounts to the Jackson Pollock–ing of the rule of law over the past eight years? With the exception of former attorney general Alberto Gonzales, not one Bush administration lawyer has been held responsible for legal risk-taking.

To be sure, Howard mainly confines his criticism of an overlawyered, rights-obsessed America to the realms of healthcare, education and the plaintiffs' bar. But his failure to address the brash risk-takers in the Bush Justice Department makes it difficult to read his book as anything beyond a spanking of America's tort lawyers.

I share a good deal of Howard's concerns about the rise in frivolous lawsuits, and the ways in which the fear of liability can impede good educational and medical judgment. My neighborhood playground also lost its "good slide" to a toddler injury. But the cure for "too much law" should not be too little, and the charge to those who feel strangled by the law should not be, "Well heck then, make some up!" If the past eight years can be made to stand for anything in the law books, let it be for the proposition that the one thing scarier than a bus full of lawyers is a bus without them.

Lithwick is a NEWSWEEK contributing editor and a senior writer for Slate. A version of this column also appears on Slate.com.

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