The Emmy Award-winning host of Court TV's Catherine Crier Live describes an American legal system dangerously out of control -- and finds the lawyers guilty as charged.
As a child, Catherine Crier was enchanted by film portrayals of crusading lawyers like Clarence Darrow and Atticus Finch. As a district attorney, private lawyer, and judge herself, she saw firsthand how the U.S. justice system worked -- and didn't. One of the most respected legal journalists and commentators today, she now confronts a profoundly unfair legal system that produces results and profits for the few -- and paralysis, frustration, and injustice for the many. Alexis de Tocqueville's dire prediction in Democracy in America has come true: We Americans have ceded our responsibility as citizens to resolve the problems of society to "legal authorities" -- and with it our democratic freedoms.
The Case Against Lawyers is both an angry indictment and an eloquent plea for a return to common sense. It decries a system of laws so complex even the enforcers -- such as the IRS -- cannot understand them. It unmasks a litigation-crazed society where billion-dollar judgments mostly line the pockets of personal injury lawyers. It deplores the stupidity of a system of liability that leads to such results as a label on a stroller that warns, "Remove child before folding." It indicts a criminal justice system that puts minor drug offenders away for life yet allows celebrity murderers to walk free. And it excoriates the sheer corruption of the iron triangle of lawyers, bureaucrats, and politicians who profit mightily from all this inefficiency, injustice, and abuse.
The Case Against Lawyers will make readers hopping mad. And it will make them realize that the only response can be to demand change. Now.
"Catherine Crier blows the top off of the courthouse. Her very readable critique on how lawyers and judges have created chaos and injustice within our justice system is a must read!"
BILL O'REILLY
"The Case Against Lawyers puts the law back where it belongs -- in the hearts, minds and hands of the American people -- while revealing the tactics and ruses that took it away from them in the first place. Part judge, part sleuth, and all sage, Catherine Crier manages to make the ultimate case for a return to democratic justice."
ARIANNA HUFFINGTON
"Passionate and hard-hitting, The Case Against Lawyers makes an overwhelming case for broad legal overhaul. By applying her own strong moral code to America's problems, Catherine Crier demonstrates the critical missing element in American law."
PHILIP HOWARD
"Catherine Crier knows where the bodies are buried in the legal world, and in this book, she unearths a graveyard of misdeeds by lawyers and makes a case for protecting the public from the self-serving way of the legal profession. As a former lawyer, judge, and now television anchor, Crier knows the sly and subtle way of lawyerly self-interest, and she has the journalistic skills to make non-lawyers take notice and seethe. Her book is a testament to all of us who revere the legal system but regret its correctible shortcomings."
FRED GRAHAM, CHIEF ANCHOR, COURT TV
"Catherine Crier lambastes the Democrats, the Republicans, the businessmen and the bureaucrats in this inspiring call to redemocratize America."
ROBERT F. KENNEDY, JR.
