Objection, your honor: it's not litigious citizens who are causing America's lawsuit glut, argues labor lawyer Thomas Geoghegan. It's the dismantling of the regulatory state.

• Author: Mencimer, Stephanie
• Position: See You in Court: How the Right Made America a Lawsuit Nation

See You in Court: How the Right Made America a Lawsuit Nation

by Thomas Geoghegan

The New Press, 256 pp.

For years, authors like Philip K. Howard, Walter Olson, and ABC's John Stossel have churned out books declaring that lawsuits and the liberal lawyers who bring them are driving the country to ruin. They argue that the country is suffering from a collective abandonment of personal responsibility that has resulted in millions of citizens ready to sue their dry cleaners and other innocent bystanders over the slightest mishap. Books offering an alternative interpretation of Americans' legendary litigiousness have been few and far between--and mostly written by Ralph Nader. So Chicago labor lawyer Thomas Geoghegan's new book, See You in Court: How the Right Made America a Lawsuit Nation, offers a refreshing variant to the anti-lawsuit publishing monolith.

Geoghegan insists that the reason for all the lawsuits has nothing to do with personal responsibility or a surge in American victimology. He starts out in agreement with the conventional wisdom that Americans have gotten more litigious (a point many a personal injury lawyer would heartily dispute, as tort litigation has been on a steady decadelong decline). But, in a pointed rebuttal to Howard and the others, he suggests that an onslaught of lawsuits--particularly the employment lawsuits that Geoghegan specializes in--is the natural by-product of thirty years of right-wing efforts to deregulate the economy and dismantle institutions that protect average people from rapacious capitalism. Geoghegan is not the first person to observe that lawsuits often flourish where government fails--UC Berkeley poli-sci professor Robert Kagan has probably cornered the academic market on the subject--but he is by far the most entertaining of the bunch.

Geoghegan's worldview is shaped by his many years representing union workers, particularly the casualties of the steel industry collapse. Readers familiar with his work will not be surprised to learn that he blames much of the problem with lawsuits on the disappearance of organized labor, or what he calls "the Big Fact." He argues, for instance, that an increase in employment litigation has coincided precisely with the demise of old-fashioned union arbitration, where labor leaders worked with management to resolve employment disputes. The old system, he says, was cheaper, with built-in protections against the horrors found in today's scorched-earth litigation.

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