I highly recommend my friend Walter Olson’s new book, Schools for Misrule: Legal Academia and an Overlawyered America. Wally is one of my favorite writers, and I modeled the style of my You Can’t Say That! on two of his previous books, The Litigation Explosion and The Excuse Factory. He’s not a lawyer, but he knows far more about what’s wrong with the American legal system than just about anyone I know.
I especially enjoyed chapters 11 and 12, which skewer the pretensions of international law scholars who seek to undermine American sovereignty and constitutional traditions in favor of global governance by international legal elites.
A WSJ review by John McGinnis can be found here, and George Leef reviews the book in the Weekly Standard here.
Apple of My Eye Roundup «ScrollPost.com says:
[...] Crosse).I don’t know whether anyone was thinking of reading Schools for Misrule based on David Bernstein’s recommendation, but allow me to say: don’t. It joins a Michael Moore volume as tied for the worst (and most [...]
April 9, 2011, 6:43 pmMonday Highlights | Pseudo-Polymath says:
[...] book recommended. Mr Schraub didn’t like it, but I think he suffers a bit from the Risky Business problem, for [...]
April 11, 2011, 9:36 amADF Alliance Alert » Book Review: Schools for Misrule: Law schools wield more social influence than any other part of the American university. To what effect?Law schools wield more social influence than any other part of the American university. To says:
[...] John O. McGinnis at the Wall Street Journal: In “Schools for Misrule,” Walter Olson offers a fine dissection of these strangely powerful institutions. One of his themes is that law professors serve the interests of the legal profession above all else; they seek to enlarge the scope of the law, creating more work for lawyers even as the changes themselves impose more costs on society. By keeping legal rules in a state of endless churning, lawyers undermine a stable rule of law and make legal outcomes less predictable; the result is more litigation and, not incidentally, more billable hours for lawyers, who must now be consulted about the most routine matters of business practice and social life. | Hat tip: David Bernstine at the Volokh Conspiracy. [...]
April 12, 2011, 11:42 am