Because the Earth needs a good lawyer.

• Author: Turner, Tom
• Position: Book Review

Tom Turner, Justice on Earth: EarthJustice and the People It Has Served (Whit River Junction, Vt.: Chelsea Green Publishing Company, 2002).

A recent cartoon in The New Yorker depicts a man who has just arrived in Hell and is being briefed. "If you don't have a lawyer," says the Devil, "We have millions of them."

That aptly captures the not-so-sublimated anger felt by those of us who believe we've been burned by unscrupulous lawyers. While we know it's essential to have lawyers defending unpopular parties in order to minimize the chances that innocent people will be punished, we're also well aware that there are staggering numbers of cases in which lawyers have worked hand-in-glove with criminals in situations that have nothing to do with maintaining the system of justice and everything to do with fattening their bank accounts. Bob Ostertag, a California investigative reporter who has been monitoring the rise of SLAPP suits (Strategic Lawsuits Against Public Participation), recently told me about a case in which a Vermont dairy farmer advertised that his milk came from cows that had been fed "no bovine growth hormone." Monsanto Corporation, which is the sole marketer of artificial bovine growth hormone, sued the farmer for "false advertising." There was no legal basis for a suit, but Monsanto could afford to spend a l ot of time in court and the farmer couldn't. The farmer was forced to settle. "It was the first time anyone has been successfully sued for false advertising when there was nothing false in the ad," Ostertag told me.

Ostertag's investigations join a growing body of documentation in which it has become apparent that the law is sometimes subverted not so much because of incompetence or mistakes, but through carefully orchestrated, heavily financed, deliberate miscarriage. Another contribution is the recent book Unequal Protection: The Rise of Corporate Dominance and the Theft of Human Rights, by Thom Hartmann, which describes how the laws of human rights have been twisted to give corporations the legal standing of individual humans. For example, corporations can sometimes block public scrutiny of their financial transactions or treatment of employees, on the grounds that such scrutiny is an invasion of "privacy."

With developments like these, it's no wonder that Americans, at least, have developed a gallows humor about lawyers, and a cynicism about the capacity of legal proceedings to make things right in cases where powerful interests bully or bulldoze weaker ones--individuals who aren't rich, or small communities, or ecosystems that don't speak English. That cynicism is briefly acknowledged by Bill McKibben, an occasional...