Illustration by KAL

AMERICANS are still chuckling about the “pants suit”. A man—a judge, no less—sued his dry cleaners for $54m for allegedly losing his trousers. A sign at the shop promised “Satisfaction Guaranteed”. The plaintiff was not satisfied, so he cried fraud. He then used his highly trained legal brain to calculate the damages he was owed. He started with $1,500, a reasonable fine for consumer fraud. He multiplied it by 12, for the number of his complaints. Then by 1,200, for the number of days he was deprived of his trousers. And then by three, for the three owners of the dry-cleaning shop. After adding a bit more for mental anguish, the total came to $67m, but he kindly reduced it to $54m.

When the case was dismissed in 2007, many felt justice had prevailed. But the defendants had been put through purgatory and saddled with $100,000 in legal costs. They closed the shop and considered moving back to South Korea. The case illustrates “an important truth about human nature—that angry people can go nuts,” observes Philip Howard, a campaigner for legal reform. What was most shocking about the pants suit was not the idiotic claim, he says, “but that the case was allowed to go on for more than two years.” Some judges think even the nuttiest plaintiffs deserve their day in court. As the judge who let a woman sue McDonald's for serving her the coffee with which she scalded herself put it: “Who am I to judge?”

The rule of law is a wonderful thing, as anyone who has visited countries ruled by the whims of the powerful can attest. But you can have too much of a wonderful thing. And America has far too much law, argues Mr Howard in a new book, “Life without Lawyers”. For nearly every problem, lawmakers and bureaucrats imagine that more detailed rules are the answer. But people need to exercise their common sense, too. Alas, the proliferation of rules is making that harder.

At a school in Florida, for example, a five-year-old girl decided to throw everyone's books and pencils on the floor. Sent to the head teacher's office, she continued to wreak havoc. Her teachers dared not restrain her physically. Instead, they summoned the police, who led her away in handcuffs, howling. The teachers acted as they did for fear of being sued. A teacher at a different school was sued for $20m for putting a hand on a rowdy child's back to guide him out of the classroom. The school ended up settling for $90,000. Understandably, many schools ban teachers from touching pupils under any circumstances. In New York City, where more than 60 bureaucratic steps are required to suspend a pupil for more than five days, teachers are so frightened of violating pupils' rights that they cannot keep order.

The relentless piling of law upon law—the federal register has 70,000 ever-changing pages—does not make for a more just society. When even the most trivial daily interactions are subject to detailed rules, individual judgment is stifled. When rule-makers seek to eliminate small risks, perverse consequences proliferate. Bureaucrats rip up climbing frames for fear that children may fall off and break a leg. So children stay indoors and get fat.

The direct costs of lawsuits are only one of the drawbacks of an over-legalistic society. Too many rules squeeze the joy out of life. Doctors who inflict dozens of unnecessary tests on patients to fend off lawsuits take less pride in their work. And although the legal system is supposed to be neutral, the scales are tilted in favour of whoever is in the wrong. Because the process is so expensive and juries are so unpredictable, blameless people often settle baseless claims to make them go away. The law is supposed to protect individuals from the state, but it often allows selfish individuals to harness the state's power to settle private scores.

A hint of hope

Will any of this change under Barack Obama? At first glance, the odds are poor. The new president is a lawyer from a party dominated by lawyers. His vice-president publicly thanked God last year that lawyers are such a problem for corporate America. When Mr Obama was in the Senate, he once voted for a mild curb on jurisdiction-shopping by class-action lawyers, but otherwise tended to vote against tort reform. And Democrats in the new Congress are itching to reward the lawyers who donated so generously to their election campaigns, for example by revoking the (admittedly short) statute of limitations on pay-discrimination claims, allowing lawyers to mine decades-old grievances.

On the plus side, Mr Obama will probably never face another Democratic primary contest, so he no longer needs to outdo other Democrats in cosying up to the trial bar. And he seems to understand how to weigh the benefits of new rules against their costs. A good sign is his expected naming of Cass Sunstein, a Harvard law professor, to head the office within the White House that vets new regulations.

Mr Sunstein is a level-headed fellow. Though a friend of Mr Obama's, he finds the “cult-like atmosphere that occasionally surrounds him” distasteful, fretting that it might make his advisers too deferential. Mr Sunstein wrote a book, “The Cost-Benefit State”, encouraging policymakers to ponder trade-offs when crafting environmental and other regulations. He co-wrote another, “Nudge”, examining how governments can use gentle coaxing rather than legal cudgels to achieve socially desirable ends. He is vigilant against unintended consequences. He cautions that crises, such as the one afflicting the financial sector, can provoke regulators to overreact. He appals the left by asking whether so many health-and-safety regulations are necessary, or even constitutional. He is less radical than Mr Howard, who wants to create specialist courts for medical malpractice claims and to give judges and officials far more authority to consider the common good when making decisions. But Mr Sunstein will tell Mr Obama some things he needs to hear, and there is a sporting chance that Mr Obama will listen.