John Hawkins of the estimable Right Wing News interviews the equally estimable Walter Olson of Overlawyered.com. Here’s a snippet:

John Hawkins: Are we really the “world’s most litigious people?” How do the number of lawsuits here compare to the number in Europe or Japan for example?

Walter Olson: The most meaningful figures for international comparisons are the ones on the size of a country’s liability insurance sector as a share of its GNP. They basically confirm the common wisdom, showing that the U.S. spends several times as much per capita as do other advanced industrial

countries. Australia is usually viewed as our nearest rival in this respect, but we still were managing as of some years back to spend something like twice as much per capita as they, while farther back in the pack come countries like Canada, the U.K., Spain and Greece…

John Hawkins: Laurence Tribe appeared “On the Record W/ Greta Van Susteren” and said that he hought animals should have legal representation that could defend their rights in court before they could be used for medical research. I thought this was one of the most insane ideas I’ve ever heard and yet

Greta seemed to agree with him. What’s your opinion of what Tribe is advocating?

Walter Olson: This is of course not a right of animals to do or refrain from doing anything; it is a right of lawyers to get themselves appointed to things. It is quite typical that when a question like this arises — should the legal profession be allowed to grab a huge new kind of power over the rest of society? — all the people invited to chat around the table about it will themselves be lawyers, and will naturally view it more favorably than if you polled a cross-section of the rest of us.

John Hawkins: What do you think of the way the Florida State Supreme Court handled the election in 2000?

Walter Olson: Its rulings did little to convince me that the court majority was acting in good faith in coming to Gore’s rescue, and the court’s dissenters seemed to feel that way too.

After catching a re-run of Alec Baldwin delivering a tortured lecture on jurisprudence to a “Politically Incorrect” panel last evening, I needed someone with Olson’s common sense to cleanse my legal palate. He’s like sorbet to Baldwin’s slightly greenish meat.