The subtitle is The Making and Breaking of the American Legal
System and the author is Bruce Cannon Gibney (2019).
In a closing fury, the writer’s take on the American legal system is
summarily explained:
“Law schools should teach students practical skills and receive
appropriate public funding to reduce legal costs; Congress should expand its
membership and staff so that it can fulfill its duties with something like
minimal competence; agencies should be relieved of quasi-judicial powers; the
shoddy and untenable doctrines of compulsory arbitration should be undone;
correctional institutions should correct; prosecutors should be bound by codes
of ethics enforceable by the public and the courts; and doctrines of sovereign
immunity re-interred in their fourteenth-century graves.”
Of all things that he covers, though, Gibney’s biggest gripe is with
the move in the past century towards an Executive Constitution, whereby the
Executive branch has great facility to interpret and enforce the law however it
deems fit – a perpetual state of the exception for the President to invoke and preempt
other bodies.
He also takes great umbrage with the militarization
of police forces. As he deftly notes
(quoting Battlestar Gallactica): “There’s a reason you separate military and
the police. One fights the enemies of
the state, the other serves and protects the people. When the military becomes both, then the
enemies of the state tend to become the people.”
He covers a lot. And it's recommended.
