Law school was never Anna Dorn's dream. It was a profession pushed on her by her parents, teachers, society... whatever. It's not the worst thing that can happen to a person; as Dorn says, law school was pretty "cushy" and mostly entailed wearing leggings every day to her classes at Berkeley and playing beer pong with her friends at night. The hardest part was imagining what it would be like to actually be a lawyer one day. But then she'd think of Glenn Close on Damages and Reese Witherspoon in Legally Blonde, and hoped for the best. After graduation, however, Dorn realized that there was nothing sexy about being a lawyer. Between the unflattering suits, sucking up to old men, and spending her days sequestered in a soul-sucking cubicle, Dorn quickly learned that being a lawyer wasn't everything Hollywood made it out to be. Oh, and she sucked at it. Not because she wasn't smart enough, but because she couldn't get herself to care enough to play by the rules. Bad Lawyer is more than just a memoir of Dorn's experiences as a less-than-stellar lawyer; it's about the less-than-stellar legal reality that exists for all of us in this country, hidden just out of sight. It's about prosecutors lying and filing inane briefs that lack any semblance of logic or reason; it's about defense attorneys sworn to secrecy-until the drinks come out and the stories start flying; and it's about judges who drink in their chambers, sexually harass the younger clerks, and shop on eBay instead of listening to homicide testimony. More than anything, this book aims to counteract the fetishization of the law as a universe based entirely on logic and reason. Exposing everything from law school to law in the media, and drawing on Dorn's personal experiences as well as her journalistic research, Bad Lawyer ultimately provides us with a fresh perspective on our justice system and the people in it, and gives young lawyers advice going forward into the 21st century.

From the bestselling author of Bad Medicine and its sequel Bad Judgment comes a wide-ranging, magisterial summation of the years-long intellectual and personal journey of an Alberta jurist who went against the grain and actually learned about Canada's indigenous people in order to become a public servant."Probably my greatest claim to fame is that I changed my mind," writes John Reilly in this broadly cogent interrogation of the Canadian justice system. Building on his previous two books, Reilly acquaints the reader with the ironies and futilities of an approach to justice so adversarial and dysfunctional that it often increases crime rather than reducing it. He examines the radically different indigenous approach to wrongdoing, which is restorative rather than retributive, founded on the premise that people are basically good and wrongdoing is the aberration, not that humans are essentially evil and have to be deterred by horrendous punishments. He marshalls extensive evidence, including an historic 19th-century US case that was ultimately decided according to Sioux tribal custom, not US federal law.And then he just comes out and says it: "My proposition is that the dominant Canadian society should scrap its criminal justice system and replace it with the gentler, and more effective, process used by the indigenous people."Punishment; deterrence; due process; the socially corrosive influence of anger, hatred and revenge; sexual offences; the expensive futility of "wars on drugs"; the radical power of forgiveness--all of that and more gets examined here. And not in a bloodlessly abstract, theoretical way, but with all the colour and anecdotal savour that could only come from an author who spent years watching it all so intently from the bench.

Justice Holmes proclaimed that 'great cases, like hard cases make bad law'. He explained that this was so because the 'hydraulic pressures' of the great case tend to distort the judgements of the justices. The purpose of this book is to examine 25 great cases that arose throughout the history of the Supreme Court and to attempt to determine whether Holmes was correct. More particularly, the book discusses the impact that the greatness of the case may have had on its presentation to the Court, the Court's deliberations, the decision, the opinion and the law that was created.

Discusses case histories of the criminaljustice system that has gone wrong.

The New York Times bestselling author brings his trademark legal acumen and passionate snark to a brilliant takedown of ten incredibly bad pieces of legislation that are causing way too much misery to millions "If it were up to me, I'd treat every law passed before the Voting Rights Act of 1965 as presumptively unconstitutional. The government of this country was illegitimate when it ruled over people who had no ability to choose the rules." --from the introduction to Bad Law While Elie Mystal may not endorse any laws created before all Americans were entitled to vote for our lawmakers, in Bad Law he hones in on ten of what he considers the most egregiously awful laws on the books today. These are pieces of legislation that are making life worse, not better, for Americans, and that--he argues with clarity, eloquence, and paradigm-shifting legal insight--should be repealed completely. On topics ranging from abortion and immigration to voting rights and religious freedom, we have chosen rules to live by that do not reflect the will of most of the people. With respect to our decision to make a law that effectively grants immunity to gun manufacturers, for example, Mystal writes, "We live in the most violent, wealthy country on earth not in spite of the law; we live in a first-person-shooter video game because of the law." But, as the bestselling author of Allow Me to Retort points out, these laws do not come to us from on high; we write them, and we can and should unwrite them. In a marvelous and original takedown spanning all the hot-button topics in the country today, one of our most brilliant legal thinkers points the way to a saner tomorrow.

An eminent constitutional scholar reveals how our approach to rights is dividing America, and shows how we can build a better system of justice.

“An essential title for anyone thinking of law school or concerned with America's dysfunctional legal system.” —Library Journal On the surface, law schools today are thriving. Enrollments are on the rise and law professors are among the highest paid. Yet behind the flourishing facade, law schools are failing abjectly. Recent front-page stories have detailed widespread dubious practices, including false reporting of LSAT and GPA scores, misleading placement reports, and the fundamental failure to prepare graduates to enter the profession. Addressing all these problems and more is renowned legal scholar Brian Z. Tamanaha. Piece by piece, Tamanaha lays out the how and why of the crisis and the likely consequences if the current trend continues. The out-of-pocket cost of obtaining a law degree at many schools now approaches $200,000. The average law school graduate’s debt is around $100,000—the highest it has ever been—while the legal job market is the worst in decades. Growing concern with the crisis in legal education has led to high-profile coverage in the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times, and many observers expect it soon will be the focus of congressional scrutiny. Bringing to the table his years of experience from within the legal academy, Tamanaha provides the perfect resource for assessing what’s wrong with law schools and figuring out how to fix them. “Failing Law Schools presents a comprehensive case for the negative side of the legal education debate and I am sure that many legal academics and every law school dean will be talking about it.” —Stanley Fish, Florida International University College of Law

An analysis of how problematic laws ought to be framed and considered From the murder of George Floyd to the systematic dismantling of voting rights, our laws and their implementation are actively shaping the course of our nation. But however abhorrent a legal decision might be—whether Dred Scott v. Sanford or Plessy v. Ferguson—the stories we tell of the law’s failures refer to their injustice and rarely label them in the language of infamy. Yet in many instances, infamy is part of the story law tells about citizens’ conduct. Such stories of individual infamy work on both the social and legal level to stigmatize and ostracize people, to mark them as unredeemably other. Law’s Infamy seeks to alter that course by making legal actions and decisions the subject of an inquiry about infamy. Taken together, the essays demonstrate how legal institutions themselves engage in infamous actions and urge that scholars and activists label them as such, highlighting the damage done when law itself acts infamously and focus of infamous decisions that are worthy of repudiation. Law's Infamy asks when and why the word infamy should be used to characterize legal decisions or actions. This is a much-needed addition to the broader conversation and questions surrounding law’s complicity in evil.

From a prominent criminal law professor, a provocative and timely exploration of how plea bargaining prevents true criminal justice reform and how we can fix it—now in paperback When Americans think of the criminal justice system, the image that comes to mind is a trial-a standard court­room scene with a defendant, attorneys, a judge, and most important, a jury. It's a fair assumption. The right to a trial by jury is enshrined in both the body of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. It's supposed to be the foundation that undergirds our entire justice system. But in Punishment Without Trial: Why Plea Bargaining Is a Bad Deal, University of North Carolina law professor Carissa Byrne Hessick shows that the popular conception of a jury trial couldn't be further from reality. That bed­rock constitutional right has all but disappeared thanks to the unstoppable march of plea bargaining, which began to take hold during Prohibition and has skyrocketed since 1971, when it was affirmed as constitutional by the Supreme Court. Nearly every aspect of our criminal justice system encourages defendants-whether they're innocent or guilty-to take a plea deal. Punishment Without Trial showcases how plea bargaining has undermined justice at every turn and across socioeconomic and racial divides. It forces the hand of lawyers, judges, and defendants, turning our legal system into a ruthlessly efficient mass incarceration machine that is dogging our jails and pun­ishing citizens because it's the path of least resistance. Professor Hessick makes the case against plea bargaining as she illustrates how it has damaged our justice system while presenting an innovative set of reforms for how we can fix it. An impassioned, urgent argument about the future of criminal justice reform, Punishment Without Trial will change the way you view the criminal justice system.

In recent years, stories of reckless lawyers and greedy citizens have given the legal system, and victims in general, a bad name. Many Americans have come to believe that we live in the land of the litigious, where frivolous lawsuits and absurdly high settlements reign. Scholars have argued for years that this common view of the depraved ruin of our civil legal system is a myth, but their research and statistics rarely make the news. William Haltom and Michael McCann here persuasively show how popularized distorted understandings of tort litigation (or tort tales) have been perpetuated by the mass media and reform proponents. Distorting the Law lays bare how media coverage has sensationalized lawsuits and sympathetically portrayed corporate interests, supporting big business and reinforcing negative stereotypes of law practices. Based on extensive interviews, nearly two decades of newspaper coverage, and in-depth studies of the McDonald's coffee case and tobacco litigation, Distorting the Law offers a compelling analysis of the presumed litigation crisis, the campaign for tort law reform, and the crucial role the media play in this process.