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A review by kelseyjosund
The Nonsense Factory: The Making and Breaking of the American Legal System by Bruce Cannon Gibney
3.0
Witty and withering, as the description says, indeed.
This is a detailed and high-minded takedown of the legal system, including many egregious examples of major failings. It has tons of citations and makes a compelling case.
But it fails to offer many avenues for improvement, opting instead to repeatedly point out entrenched and systematic problems. Identifying problems is only half of the task! While it would make the book far longer (which would admittedly be a problem, given that it's already quite dense and long), it would make it far stronger, too. It feels incomplete to detail, for example, all the ways law school fails to prepare lawyers, without even touching on why it has not been improved, if its failures are so obvious. And there are points when the argument even undermines itself: according to the author, a huge part of why the courts work is trust in their near-infallibility, but then he spends thirty pages explaining how deeply flawed they are. Isn't pointing out their immense failures only making the problem worse?
I still recommend this, but I also recommend reading with a critical eye. It exposed me to a lot of new information, but it did clearly have an agenda.
This is a detailed and high-minded takedown of the legal system, including many egregious examples of major failings. It has tons of citations and makes a compelling case.
But it fails to offer many avenues for improvement, opting instead to repeatedly point out entrenched and systematic problems. Identifying problems is only half of the task! While it would make the book far longer (which would admittedly be a problem, given that it's already quite dense and long), it would make it far stronger, too. It feels incomplete to detail, for example, all the ways law school fails to prepare lawyers, without even touching on why it has not been improved, if its failures are so obvious. And there are points when the argument even undermines itself: according to the author, a huge part of why the courts work is trust in their near-infallibility, but then he spends thirty pages explaining how deeply flawed they are. Isn't pointing out their immense failures only making the problem worse?
I still recommend this, but I also recommend reading with a critical eye. It exposed me to a lot of new information, but it did clearly have an agenda.