Synopses & Reviews
A powerful new argument that right-wing legal policy gives Americans no recourse but to sue one another, by the National Book Critics Circle Award nominee.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 systema 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.
Review
"Entertaining . . . breezy. . . . The essential charm of Geoghegan’s writing is his honest, self-deprecatory style." —
The Washington Monthly"Good fun . . . [Geoghegan’s] a sharp thinker. . . . See You in Court makes a good case that deregulation has damaged the justice system in many ways." —Chicago Reader
Synopsis
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.
About the Author
Thomas Geoghegan is a practicing attorney and the author of several books, including
In America’s Court: How a Civil Lawyer Who Likes to Settle Stumbled into a Criminal Trial, the National Book Critics Circle Award finalist
Which Side Are You On?: Trying to Be for Labor When It’s Flat on Its Back,
See You in Court: How the Right Made America a Lawsuit Nation, and
Were You Born on the Wrong Continent?: How the European Model Can Help You Get a Life, all published by The New Press. He has written for
The Nation, the
New York Times, and
Harper’s. He lives in Chicago.