Top
Twenty-sixth and Cal is the Cook County criminal court house in Chicago that labor lawyer Thomas Geoghegan finds odd and surprising, despite his twenty years of practicing civil law.
Geoghegan is accustomed to civil practice, in which "complex litigation" fades out slowly into settlement. Thus, when he is asked by a friend to assist in a criminal case he is unprepared for the much quicker folk justice of state criminal court. The case at hand is the defense of a twenty-two-year-old who, at age fifteen, was sentenced to forty years in prison for acting as the unarmed lookout in a botched holdup. Now there is a retrial, and Geoghegan must face the whims of jury selection, prosecutorial advantage, and the fact that one youth's life will be determined forever in just three days of court proceedings. In an America that now routinely imprisons kids as adults, he comes to see this small case as a basic test of human rights.
The case also leads Geoghegan to reevaluate his own career as a civil lawyer, and the ways he might use the law of effect social change. In America's Court argues that even now, despite the low comedy of so many lawyers' lives, we may be seeing the beginning of a new era of American law based on global human rights. In America's Court is both a compelling narrative and a candid look at what kind of justice our society provides for its citizens.
