36 of 39 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Another masterpiece, February 20, 2008
We all know conservatism killed something. It's just hard for us to put our finger on exactly what. We smell it, we feel it, we taste it--how the elementary particles of civilization, the very molecules that join together our social life, have been breaking down. But, not being molecular physicists, we somehow can't describe it, can't name it. You have to be really, really smart, pay extraordinary attention to the tiniest details, to do that.
Tom Geoghegan? He's our molecular physicist. In his daily work as a lawyer for people screwed by the new American order--employees fired for joining a union, losing their pensions, replaced by younger workers that companies can pay less; working mothers whose daily life is monopolized by harassment from collection agencies; retirees sued for debts they didn't even know they owed--he's gathered the evidence to make sense of all that does not make sense.
So read Tom Geoghegan. For those who haven't had time for See You in Court--let alone his other masterpieces, Which Side Are You On? (1991), The Secret Lives of Citizens, and In America's Court (2002)--I'm pleased to provide Cliff Notes. <a href="http://www.ourfuture.org/blog-entry/see-you-court-quote-day-long-and-short-it">Read this.</a> I'll wait.
Back yet? Good. You're hooked.
So what's the argument?
In the world Ronald Reagan gave us, "More and more people experience the law as arbitrary." Our work lives, even if we weren't necessarily in unions, were bounded by stable, transparent, easily enforceable contracts. Now we sign "employee handbooks" that look like labor contracts used to look--"but on page 100 it says: 'Nothing herein is enforceable.' Warning: This is not a contract. We take job because of promised "lifetime" benefits that get cut off with a week's warning.
Here's a classic Geoghegan aperçus, what he sees every day in the trenches among his working class clients: "With no early retirement and no funded pension based on thirty years and out, the only way 'out' for people now is to fight to get on Social Seurity disability.... Disability is the new kind of welfare, a kind of AFDC for older men. We got young single mothers off welfare, and we have older men on instead.... And they aren't faking. People really are sick. It's the stress of not having a pension or a retirement. To keep taking on stress is an unconscious way of trying to put yourself out of business. It's a call for help. Or maybe it's despair."
I guess that's why Geoghegan's books don't become bestsellers: most of us would prefer to avert our eyes from the spectacle of old men working themselves near to death, intentionally, because it's the only way they can imagine a secure and stable environment. Of course we avert our eyes: we let it happen. "Over the last thirty years, we have made big changes in the law. But to all these big changes, there has been no real consent."
What happened? Instead of contracts, we have tort--suing people for perceived wrongs. That got rid of an efficient, predictable, cheap method for settling disputes. "People scream over something for years that a union business agent used to handle in a single afternoon." Instead, you get slash-and-burn lawsuits, with endless periods of harassing "discovery," in which opposing lawyers endeavor into plaintiff and defendants' hearts. Which rich corporations love. Because they can afford to hire more and more voracious lawyers, and keep the thing going on forever, until ordinary folks simply give up.
Or, if it's a credit card company they're dealing with, they'll be forced to submit to "arbitration"--and the banks literally hire the arbitrators. "The more we 'rationalize' the law to get out of the way of the market, the more irrational and arbitrary it seems to become."
"People want more stability, but they keep getting less." That's the wages of deregulation." Instead of the government setting the rules, we give the field over to boodlers, and call it a "free market." "And one paradox is that the more we deregulate, the more we have to go to court--much more than fifty years ago." Or, as he puts it more pithily: "When people are treated like suckers, no wonder they're in court." And the rich love lawsuits. Or they certainly prefer them to democracy.
They hate citizenship, too. All Tom's books are about citizenship. In this one, he points out that when companies fire union-minded folk, they strangle nascent citizens in their cradle--"the types who go to meetings. Our worthiest citizens learned a terrible lesson: don't stick your neck out, don't worry about your neighbor, don't get involved. All these illegal firings had a paralyzing effect on the political life of this country, as it is lived out at the median income level and below."
Another cost of deregulation: "charitable institutions" that chew people up and spits them up like bloodthirsty beasts. "No trustees, the guardians... Indeed, these new voracious 'charities' are partly responsible for our litigation mess... Hospitals and doctors sue their patients far more than their patients sue them." One thing it isn't: a free market. A "charity" hospital "picks any price it likes, and then effectively negotiates the real contract in court, by threat and intimidation."
All these intersecting vicious circles just degrade the moral level of our civilization. "Getting rid of law does not end litigation. It often leads to new types of litigation, especially the kind where people stalk each other for revenge."
"We can identify with the guarded or we can identify with the guards.... more and more of us are developing the moral character of guards..... Instead of celebrating equality under the law, we are developing more of a Hindu sense of caste."
"It will be truly hard to imagine all of us under a single rule of law.... It's not the income inequality, but the sense of unfairness and futility that is so destabilizing."
"Perhaps as the rich get richer, the meek get meeker. Instead of farmers or skilled mechnanics or industrial workers in unions, more people work in 'services.' They 'serve.' Just as waiters depend on the rich for tips, more of us also earn our living by currying favor with people higher up."
Grim stuff, yes. But as for me, it's not like I read every word Tom Geoghegan writes out of some misbegotten sense of duty. I read it because he's hilarious.
"I became co-counsel in a suit against a drug company. The original lawyer started with one woman, a top salesperson. The drug company replaced her with an ex-college cheerleader, a blond bunny who could lure the doctors into the lobby and giggle and say, 'Would you like to see my pills?' But usually it's a pattern. In fact, other people lost jobs to bunnies. The drug industry is turning into a version of Hooter's."
Hilarious, and hopeful.
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10 of 11 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Re-making the Rule of Law in America, December 18, 2007
There is no index; there are no notes, no citations of sources. With its fanciful writing, its humor and stretched arguments, at times it seems like fiction. But underneath it is serious non-fiction, designed to provoke attention to the important subject of the state of the American legal system.
Goeghegan discusses change in the law, particularly what he describes as a shift from contract law to torts, and the impact this has had on the litigation rate. What is significant, whether you buy his thesis or not, is that he emphasizes political reasons for the change, primarily deregulation brought about by the political right. This is in contrast to the tack taken by many current critics to the effect that judges (almost alone) have fuzzed up the law to such an extent that there is no certainty, leading to a lottery mentality and a rise in litigation; and that lawyers generally are to blame for filing too many lawsuits. His thesis extends to charging that in the areas such as workers' pensions and non-profit hospitals, the lack of "trust" law, or a contractual fiduciary obligation, necessarily leads to more and nastier litigation because there are no longer clear contract-type rules in place to protect legitimate interests. Although the book refers to European and other nations as doing a better job of limiting litigation, it could benefit from additional reference to comparative law studies that describe the trade-off: those countries have a lot more beaucratic government control of pensions, medicine, etc., leaving much less to litigate. While this supports his thesis, it ignores the issue of the price that is paid.
As you read on, you wonder who is the intended audience. The treatment of legal matters is not what most lawyers would want to see. For example, the author likes class actions, and gives good reasons for them. But he decries the Class Action Fairness Act as making it impossible to resolve national matters in one suit, never mentioning that a primary feature of the Act is to remove such cases from state court to federal court, where they would then be handled. He mentions 100,000 federal civil filings per year (the 2006 figures indicate about 180,000 civil filings, excluding prisoner petitions) but doesn't mention the roughly 7,500,000 civil filings in the state courts of general jurisdiction. He pushes for more "model" law, and a rendering of common law into statutory law. He's not very keen on the judges, saying that their opinions come from the facts that they regard as important. In this regard, he is in line with the old legal realist criticisms of judges, and perhaps the more conventional assault on our legal system. But while his ideas and observations may trouble lawyers on the left as well as on the right, the range of subjects examined gives the nonlawyer lots to think about.
Geoghegan closes with his insistence on the value of the law, and in particular a more predictable Rule of Law. He equates a public emphasis on and deliberation of the law with morality. He favors promoting majority rule; he yearns for what he calls the "wisdom of crowds", meaning the collective intelligence of the electorate. And in this sense he asks the reader to be a better participant, to exercise the wisdom of a good juror in judging and guiding our legal system.
By Ted Preston, author of Judging the Lawyers
Judging the Lawyers: A Jury-Box View of the Case Against American Lawyers
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18 of 23 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Focus, Tom, Focus!, December 29, 2007
I really like this author and his work. I thought "Which Side Are You On?" was a tight, well-reasoned and passionate thesis on the current state of union leadership.
However...
His passion got the best of him. This book, most regrettably, crossed some line between argument and diatribe. It became tiresome to follow the author from thesis and topic into the weeds, over and over again, with yet another "war story" about working with the northern Illinois court system.
His thesis here is, once again, really strong and very, very provocative. Its power is unintentionally undermined by an overly demonstrative and self-pitying style. Makes reading not only unpleasant, but undisciplined and unfocused.
He's a lawyer and should know better. Tom, pretend the readership is a jury and then try it again...
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