I'm no neocon, but I was mugged last year by the reality of my daughter's recess. The school wouldn't let her play freeze tag or anything else that entailed…running.

When I asked a friend on the Board of Education for the rationale, he replied, "Principals are free to ban that, if they're worried about liability." I put the obvious follow-up: "So the school's been sued by families whose kids got hurt while running at recess?" Oh no, he replied, "It's a preventive step."

No running at recess. This would be disturbing enough in isolation. But the schools in Broward County, Florida, have installed signs prohibiting the scurrilous practice. (Their policy is more rooted in legitimate fear than paranoia, the county having settled 189 playground suits over a five-year period.)

Run-free zones have been reported from Massachusetts to Texas and California. The National Association of Early Childhood Specialists in State Departments of Education cites it as "an alarming trend."

I am not puckering to plant the wet kiss of tort reform on malfeasants. Ideologues, insurance company shills, and corporate apologists for years have exaggerated the frequency of frivolous litigation. Many mask an agenda designed to close the courthouse door to legitimate victims of industrial pollution or sexual harassment or medical malpractice. But the extreme reformers' quackery doesn't mean that America's civil justice system is healthy.

Philip K. Howard doesn't sell the old snake oil. I was not completely receptive to his mid-1990s bestseller, The Death of Common Sense. I resisted its critique by horror story, and found it more hortatory than programmatic; plus, to be honest, my frustrated playground player had not been born yet.

But his new book, Life Without Lawyers (Norton, $24.95), both deepens his diagnosis of our legal sclerosis and provides therapy, if not a cure. While shy of rigorously statistical analysis, its cumulative indictment of America's litigious exceptionalism is closely reasoned and leavened by a sociopolitical generosity. It also proffers third-way thinking that punctures both the tort reformers' reductionism and the trial lawyers' protectionism.

Howard limns a world of hyperlegality that has spread like mold over the structures of everyday life: teachers who can't discipline classrooms, doctors who over-prescribe batteries of dubious tests, supervisors prevented from reining in featherbedders—all due to fear of litigation. Importantly, he looks through both ends of the telescope, worrying as much about students, patients, and workers as about those who have their charge.

The school stories transcend the playground, with seemingly paradoxical, but actually parallel, results. Inaction: New York requires a 60-step process before student suspension. Overreaction: A Fort Myers, Florida, school's zero-tolerance policy results in the suspension of an honor student in 2001 after a kitchen knife is found on the back seat of her car on school grounds. Total absurdity: A kindergartner in St. Petersburg (time to rename it the Sunstroke State) is led away in handcuffs in 2005 because the principal fears legal reprisals for disciplining the girl's temper tantrum.

Perception becomes reality. Howard cites a 2005 poll that found only 16 percent of Americans would trust justice if someone brought a baseless claim against them. Nor can we forget the attendant costs of time and money. For example, it's true that the plaintiff who filed a $54 million claim against a Washington, D.C., dry cleaners for a ruined pair of pants did not prevail—but it took two years, $100,000 in defendant legal fees, and the cleaners closed shop.

On the flip side of the "delayed, denied" ledger, a 2006 Harvard School of Public Health study found that the average settlement time for injured patients in medical malpractice cases was five years. (Worse, 25 percent of settlements were found without merit, and 25 percent of claims with merit went unpaid.)

Howard's assessment of the resultant harm is shrewd: "This system, supposedly neutral, in fact tilts the scales in favor of whoever is in the wrong. Defendants can coerce an unfair settlement by dragging their feet, and plaintiffs can extort settlements by suing for ruinous damages irrespective of actual loss or fault."

The writer locates the first causes of all this in the revolutions of the Progressive Era and the Civil Rights Era. Wait, wait. Howard lauds both periods' advancements as badly needed and long overdue. Indeed, although Hayek is a guiding light in much of his analysis, the author ladles in plenty of John Rawls (absent from The Death of Common Sense), plus Akhil Amar, Cass Sunstein, Jared Diamond, and Bill Bradley.

His point is that the eras of social progress transmogrified into a pathological distrust of authority on both the left (fear all business) and right (fear all government).

The unwitting left-right conspiracy too often tars any authority as authoritarian. In response, individual or subgroup interests have plunged into the vacuum via lawsuit, effectively privatizing Constitutional rights and leaving us with "a tyranny of the angry individual."