See You in Court: How the Right Made America a Lawsuit Nation

Since the dawn of the Reagan era, America's traditional legal structures have been gradually undermined, replaced by a kind of legal rage that has led to an explosion in the number of lawsuits. Why do Americans sue each other as often as we do and how has this basic rift in our civic trust come to pass?

In an impassioned rebuttal to books such as Philip K. Howard's The Death of Common Sense, which argue that liberals have made the United States overly litigious, public-interest lawyer and award-winning author Thomas Geoghegan explains why these books have it backwards. In reality, Geoghegan argues, it is the conservative revolution that opened the floodgates of litigation and helped to spur the lawsuit culture that Howard and others decry. According to Geoghegan, the country's current addiction to litigation and the need to find someone wrong is a natural response to the right's dismantling of America's postwar legal system--a system based on contract, trust, and administrative law, in which it was not necessary to go to court in order to stay solvent, keep your job, or recover from an accident.

Sure to provoke heated debate, See You in Court shows why the right is wrong about the source of our lawsuit culture, and points the way back to civil society.

While just about everyone agrees that we've become a lawsuit nation, is it really class actions by a coterie of private trial lawyers whose enormous settlements and, in Karl Rove's words, "junk lawsuits" that are subverting democracy? Thomas Geoghegan, whom Time called "a modern-day Quixote of the legal profession," thinks not.

In this impassioned rebuttal to Philip K. Howard's The Death of Common Sense, Geoghegan deftly shows how conservatives' dismantling of America's postwar legal system opened the floodgates of litigation. Most often people sue, he argues, because of what they have lost—contract rights, pensions, health insurance, decent medical care, and strong unions. Without these methods of preempting and resolving disputes, Americans who face injury, bankruptcy, discrimination, or injustice are left with no recourse but the lawsuit.

Both smart and provocative, See You in Court shows why the right is wrong about the source of our lawsuit culture and points the way back to civil society.