Legal Research

Is the law broken?

By Mariko

Having been recently introduced to TED, I’ve been spending some time wandering around the archives to see what sort of ideas they deem worth spreading.  Among talks about Legos and fiction and the Mars Rovers, I found a talk given by Philip K. Howard entitled Four Ways to Fix a Broken Legal System.

In this talk, Howard gives examples of teachers and doctors who are not as effective in their chosen fields because one wrong step will get them sued for giving Johnny a C or failing to give Alice an MRI.  He also mentions such phenomenons as coffee cups that warn that the contents are hot and fishing hooks packaged with warnings that the contents are harmful if swallowed.  Law should be a platform for trust, he says, and it should be simple enough that people can internalize it.

I’ve left a lot out, and you should really listen to the talk, but in the end, my question holds.  Is the law, as Howard says, broken?  If so, what can we do to change things for the better?

Full post as published by Ross-Blakley Law Library Blog on July 18, 2010 (boomark / email).