Woe Unto You Lawyers

By Fred Rodell

Book Overview

No Synopsis Available.

• Format: Mass Market Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0425044386
• ISBN13: 9780425044384
• Release Date: January 1980
• Publisher: Berkley Publishing Group
• Length: 180 Pages
• Weight: 0.28 lbs.

Customer Reviews

A Cogent, Funny Critique of the Legal Profession

In his introduction to "The High Citadel," a book about Harvard Law School, Ralph Nader perceptively commented that legal thinking and legal education in America suffer from 'a brilliant myopia and a superfluous rigor.' 'Woe' is Fred Rodell's shotgun blast at the American legal system: its language, its procedures, and its pedagogy in our law schools. From the blatant brainwashing techniques of legal education to the near-Papal reverence accorded to the justices of the Supreme Court, Rodell exposes The Law, as it is practiced and taught in America, for what it really is. An intellectual prodigy whose IQ was said to be over 180, Rodell became no less a high priest than a faculty member at the sanctum sanctorum of American legal education, The Yale Law School, where he taught legal writing and consistently won teaching awards for nearly forty years. He refused, however, to kill trees by publishing pointless, long-winded law review articles, which he ceased writing after penning one of the most famous law review articles ever published: "Goodye to Law Reviews" -- a devastatingly funny satire of the genre. Rodell conveys the absurdity of a system that works well for the lawyers but not very well at all for the clients. With a deft, Twainian wit, Rodell shows how lawyers are blinded to their own self-interest by the many props the legal system provides to legitimize itself. These in turn help justify the immensely wasteful expenditures of time and resources that the legal system requires for people to resolve even simple disputes, or simply to figure out how to run their affairs to avoid stepping on legal landmines. Rodell describes how the elaborate and effective indoctrination of law school is abetted by a host of props that endow the law with an august appearance of wisdom, integrity, and probity. From the black robes of the judge to the weighty, leather-bound casebooks and reporters of the law library, to the expensive educational credentials of the legal elite, everything about the law bespeaks a kind of scientific precision of thought, in a realm governed by systematic procedures that have evolved for centuries. Tearing back the curtain, Rodell argues that the legal system is hardly such a well-oiled clock. Rather, it is byzantine and entirely unpredictable, and the logic of jurisprudence fails even the most basic tests of consistency and reliability. Rather, the apparently hard-and-fast rules of the law are infinitely malleable and subject to endless dispute -- while the lawyers' meters are running at astronomical rates, and a vast bureaucracy churns away at a glacial pace, paid for by taxpayers' money. A wonderful sample of the writing in this book is this paragraph, in which Rodell describes the initiation of law students: "There is no more pointed demonstration of the chasm between ordinary human thinking and the mental processes of the lawyer than in the almost universal reaction of law students when they first encounter The