Bruce Cannon Gibney

Interesting critique of US law because it looks into some less prominent but nevertheless important issues:

State immunity from civil suits: is it appropriate in a republic?
Bureaucratic regulation-writing and agency courts: do they unconstitutionally blur powers that ought to be separate?
Arbitration and plea-bargaining: is justice served by avoiding trials?
Congress: does the idea of legislative intent make sense coming from a legislature where most of the intellectual work is done by staff and lobbyists?
Legal costs: why have costs exploded and what is lost when legal counsel is increasingly beyond the reach of ordinary working people?
Judges: why do they not use their powers to get cases heard speedily and without allowing procedural games to become a war of attrition?
Law schools: does the case briefing method teach what lawyers need to be able to do in practice?
Etc.

Lots of facts and informed opinion without partisanship. Also, the writing is often snappy, ironic and frank, dispensing with myths like judges' claim that they are not legislators: developing common law is making the law!

The book portrays an American legal system that is overworked, unaffordable, and struggling to survive only by allowing its proper work to be offloaded to arbitrators, bureaucracies and prosecutors, as protections for your right to a fair hearing before and at trial in court are progressively eroded.… (mais)

Many folks might pass on the book based on its obvious premise without knowing what they're missing. While most might agree that this country's legal system is broken, they definitely wouldn't be able to identify the problems, or the solutions. Gibney does all of that with a ver thorough, deep, and well-thought out examination of everything from the law's origins to education to economics. Everything supported by statistics. This is the rare book focused on timely problems with suggestions about how to pull back from the brink. It's not a terribly conservative perspective, but also not terribly liberal either. Highly recommended.… (mais)

I remember, what feels a lifetime ago, having open and frank discussions with people I partly agreed with, partly didn't, who knew things I didn't know, who didn't know things I did, and that I could absolutely respect and enjoy the company of. It was a more innocent time when information was swapped and honest reaction was expected.

I got to have that feeling again. And it was wonderful.

There are obvious areas of bias and other areas where additional research would have been recommended. But there were more where I learned things that filled in holes, connected things I already knew, and generally proved so fascinating that I had to stop using it as an audiobook background and let myself focus and dig in. So much helped me understand so much more.

The book was written in 2015, so bear that in mind. And he seems to have an allergy to Bernie Sanders. Which is a shame as Bernie has done economic research that would have been very fitting in this work.

But a great work and I fully commend it. It's hard to make economic histories interesting but this book does so with seeming ease. And for that alone it deserves real credit.… (mais)