The Case Against Lawyers
How the Lawyers, Politicians, and Bureaucrats Have Turned the Law into an Instrument of Tyranny--and What We as Citizens Have to Do About It
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- $7.99
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- $7.99
Publisher Description
THE EMMY AWARD-WINNING HOST OF COURT TV’S "CATHERINE CRIER LIVE" DESCRIBES AN AMERICAN LEGAL SYSTEM DANGEROUSLY OUT OF CONTROL – AND FINDS THE LAWYERS GUILTY AS CHARGED.
As a child, Catherine Crier was enchanted by film portrayals of crusading lawyers like Clarence Darrow and Atticus Finch. As a district attorney, private lawyer, and judge herself, she saw firsthand how the U.S. justice system worked – and didn’t. One of the most respected legal journalists and commentators today, she now confronts a profoundly unfair legal system that produces results and profits for the few – and paralysis, frustration, and injustice for the many. Alexis de Tocqueville’s dire prediction in Democracy in America has come true: We Americans have ceded our responsibility as citizens to resolve the problems of society to "legal authorities" – and with it our democratic freedoms.
The Case Against Lawyers is both an angry indictment and an eloquent plea for a return to common sense. It decries a system of laws so complex even the enforcers – such as the IRS – cannot understand them. It unmasks a litigation-crazed society where billion-dollar judgments mostly line the pockets of personal injury lawyers. It deplores the stupidity of a system of liability that leads to such results as a label on a stroller that warns, “Remove child before folding.” It indicts a criminal justice system that puts minor drug offenders away for life yet allows celebrity murderers to walk free. And it excoriates the sheer corruption of the iron triangle of lawyers, bureaucrats, and politicians who profit mightily from all this inefficiency, injustice, and abuse.
The Case Against Lawyers will make readers hopping mad. And it will make them realize that the only response can be to demand change. Now.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
"You can't win, but the lawyers will": in support of this statement, former judge and Court TV personality Crier strings together anecdotes highlighting the unfairness and economic inefficiencies that lawyers have engendered in a commonsensical and sometimes shocking indictment. A self-described "inveterate newspaper clipper," Crier bases her argument on examples of legal excess. A woman who collected $450,000 after tripping in a Tucson park gopher hole illustrates how extreme civil damage awards have become. (Her lawyer contended that the city needed to "provide a safe alternative to dodging holes and caved-in tunnels.") Fear of lawsuits has led to all kinds of absurdities, like the warning on the baby stroller that reads, "Remove child before folding." Crier couples her storytelling with a folksy Texas vernacular that makes her points accessible to nonlawyers. Her contention that the legal system is broken is not new, and she acknowledges her debt to books such as Philip K. Howard's The Death of Common Sense. In her desire to convince, however, she tends to overstate her case and sometimes the law itself. When Richard Garcia sued police for not arresting him for public intoxication, thereby allowing him to get into a later car wreck, Crier writes, "We seem to expect cops to anticipate new court decisions as their behavior is critiqued after the fact." But the Supreme Court holds that government officials are immune from suit unless they violate "clearly established" rights. In her defense, however, Crier makes no pretense of presenting a balanced, scholarly book. Hers is an amusing polemic that correctly identifies many of our legal system's problems.
