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Thomas Geoghegan

See You in Court: How the Right Made America a Lawsuit Nation Paperback – January 4, 2009

by Thomas Geoghegan (Author)

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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.

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"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

Review

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.

Paperback: 246 pages
Publisher: The New Press (January 4, 2009)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 1595584102
ISBN-13: 978-1595584106
Product Dimensions: 5.2 x 1 x 7.8 inches
Shipping Weight: 10.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
Customer Reviews: 6 customer ratings
Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #4,756,574 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #344 in Consumer Law Business Law
- #5374 in Legal History (Books)
- #3501 in Civil Law Procedure (Books)

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Richard P.

A good explanation of why weak or nonexistant laws for the public good, allow organizations to sue so many people.

Reviewed in the United States on December 1, 2014

Verified Purchase

I really like Thomas Geoghegan, and purchase almost all of his books. As in his other books he offers fresh and novel perspective to why certain trends take hold. Unfortunately these trends tend to be undesirable.

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Shanti Fry

Law for the nonlawyer

Reviewed in the United States on February 18, 2008

I have read and loved all of Tom Geoghegan's books because of Tom's search for a commonsense morality that can applied to the problems of our time. See You in Court extends that search to the way that the law has crept into most transactions in life. Geoghegan takes on the explosion of court cases and their effect on our innate sense of justice which has been mainly detrimental.

This development is paradoxical when we reflect on the great numbers of people,many like Tom, who went to law school with the idea of somehow contributing to a better society while being able to make a reasonable living. How did we end up the situation we find ourselves in now where a lucky few hit it big with large jury driven settlements and everyone else is stuck with little recourse when faced with routine injustice?

Tom Geoghegan's fearless exploration of these issues is enlightening. Some reviewers decry the lack of a more typical legal academic framework, wincing at Geoghegan's self revelations which are rarely flattering to Geoghegan,contrary to the practice of most authors. But it is exactly this type of examination, self and otherwise, that makes this book a good entree for nonlawyers.

If you care about justice,both lofty and as it exists (or doesn't) in the everyday, this is a highly worthwhile book. Geoghegan takes law ouside the courtroom and private negotiations to speculate on how and why we ended up with the sytem we have today. He points to possible solutions, though that is not the real purpose of the book. Instead he describes the problem, provokes our sympathy and ire, and asks us to look at a far bigger picture in seeking solutions.

LIke all the Geoghegan books, you will find yourself, "talking back" to the book, internally debating his theses and mulling over the stories. Once a Geoghegan book enters your consciousness, it rarely leaves. And isn't that the best reason to read?

4 people found this helpful

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Albert W. Preston

Re-making the Rule of Law in America

Reviewed in the United States on 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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