Filing a Heartfelt Appeal Against the Legal System

• Author: Adam Liptak
• Position: National Legal Correspondent for The New York Times
• Pages: 11-13

Filing a Heartfelt Appeal Against the Legal System^*

Page11

"One of the dirty little secrets of the legal system," Thane Rosenbaum writes in this simultaneously woolly and provocative book, "is that if people could simply learn how to apologize, lawyers and judges would be out of work."

Mr. Rosenbaum is a lawyer and a professor at Fordham Law School, but his aim here is to burn down his own house. He proposes a sort of talking cure for the legal system. There is, he says, too much emphasis on money in civil cases and on punishment in criminal ones. The system should focus instead, he writes, on the dignity of the participants and on hearing them out. The American justice system, he says, "relies too much on logic and not enough on love."

Where lawyers see a set of carefully calibrated neutral principles meant to ensure equal treatment, Mr. Rosenbaum sees a system that robs participants in lawsuits and prosecutions of the opportunity to tell their own messy, contradictory, inconclusive stories. Where lawyers see legal doctrines that prevent the filing of stale claims and the presentation of irrelevant evidence, he sees a conspiracy to silence the truth.

He works, then, from first principles. His suggested reforms are powerfully impractical. But that does not mean he is wrong.

It is certainly true, for instance, that treating people with respect and acknowledging responsibility is both the decent thing to do and a...