Philip Howard pointed out a sketch on the wall of the luxurious offices of his law firm, Covington & Burling. The sketch, by the early American engineer Robert Fulton, portrays a ship’s underwater cannon aimed at the hull of another ship, and assumes that the cannonball would propel through the ocean with destructive speed.

“He didn’t understand the density of water,” Mr. Howard said, with a touch of the exasperation that talk of waste and inefficiency provoke in him. “It would have made it about that far,” he said, pointing to a place a few inches from the mouth of the cannon.

Mr. Howard is better known for his criticism of the policies of the present, not the past, making his name as a legal reform advocate who described American society as bogged down by bureaucracy and living in fear of pointless lawsuits in his best-selling books “The Death of Common Sense” and “The Collapse of the Common Good.”

Last winter, Mr. Howard, a lawyer who is vice chairman of Covington & Burling, turned his eyes to a new project. Frustrated by what he calls the “shallowness” of the political debates in the run-up to the presidential election, he wanted to create a forum where experts on political hot-button issues from both sides of the aisle could come together and discuss them in greater depth than is usually done.

Six months later, the result is Newtalk.org, a sleek, interactive Web site that some of Mr. Howard’s high-powered friends in marketing advised him on for no fee. The participants — some from think tanks and universities, others former and current politicians — engage each other in 250-word Web log posts over three days on topics such as obesity, nuclear energy, and the growing cost of entitlements. Each discussion is moderated, and a team of editors works to make sure the posts are short enough and civil to the other participants. The idea is to create the atmosphere of a “slow-motion dinner party,” not a heady debate, Mr. Howard said.

“It’s a format that’s only possible because of new media,” Mr. Howard said. “It took somebody who knew nothing — to wit, me — to sort of figure that out I guess.”

The discussions so far have been congenial: Even a nuclear policy analyst from Greenpeace and the former chairman of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission were able to discuss the future of nuclear energy and limit themselves to throwing only a few mild barbs at each other.

“In debates, people typically hurl some point of view or fact across the table and then they refuse to respond when someone hurls something back,” Mr. Howard said.

“I thought the discussion [on nuclear energy] was useful not withstanding the disagreement, because you do have the back and forth.”

Mr. Howard is known for his bipartisan approach. It makes sense that someone who has worked for Vice President Gore as well as a former U.S. senator of Georgia, Zell Miller, has created a Web site that features commentary from such political stalwarts as Bill Bradley, Mayor Bloomberg, and Bob Kerrey.

In 2002, Mr. Howard founded a nonprofit organization, the Common Good, to promote legal reform, specifically in the area of medical malpractice suits. The group has partnered with the Harvard School of Public Health to develop and promote the idea of trying malpractice suits in separate medical courts.

Mr. Howard said real legal change usually requires consensus, and even then is rare.

“Once something gets passed as a law, changing it is like trying to scrape away concrete and Washington is this huge edifice of legal concrete,” he said.

He said Newtalk, by getting experts together from all political parties, strives to build this consensus.

“There’s a lot of agreement on the right and the left that the current system has kind of lost its energy, lost its way, and become bloated and bureaucratic and inertial, and the worst example of that is Washington itself,” Mr. Howard said.

He said the most important audience for the site is its participants, but that he plans a marketing push to attract more visitors.

“These are really important people, so if they’re together talking about it, that’s the group we wanted to reach in the first place,” Mr. Howard said.

He said President Clinton, Mitt Romney, and Rep. Ron Paul are on his short list of people to ask to participate on Newtalk.