See You in Court

by Geoghegan, Thomas

• ISBN13: 9781595580993
• ISBN10: 1595580999
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2007-10-01
• Publisher: New Pr

Summary

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 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.

Table of Contents

Prologue: A Warning at the Red Mass	p. 1
Do We Have Too Much Democracy?	p. 9
From Contract to Tort: How We Experience the Rule of Law at Work	p. 25
From the Law of Trusts to the Collection Courts: How Charities Came to Prey on Beneficiaries	p. 40
From Administrative Law to No Law: The Rise of the Whistle-Blower and the Trial Lawyer	p. 58
The Deregulation of Public Space: Or, the End of Equity	p. 71
The War on Reason, Uniformity, and Predictability in the Law: Why the Right Hates Class Action	p. 81
Why Litigation Costs Are Going Up	p. 93
How Attacking Litigation Is Increasing Litigation	p. 104
How We Went to Court as Creditors and Ended Up as Debtors	p. 116
Do You Really Want to See a Jury?	p. 132
But Would You Rather Get a Judge?	p. 144
So What Is Our Judicial Philosophy?	p. 164
Living in the Fourth Republic	p. 187
The Case Against Civilization	p. 216
The Plan	p. 225
Epilogue	p. 243
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