The Rule of Lawyers: How the New Litigation Elite Threatens America's Rule of Law

Walter Olson's The Rule of Lawyers is a highly relevant book for our ever more litigious society. In a well-written 307 pages, Olson presents a scathing indictment of what he refers to as "the Fourth Branch of Government"- trial lawyers. Olson clearly and persuasively argues in this book against the tort industry- beginning the book with a history of how our nation has allowed open season on a variety of industries- tobacco, car manufacturers, and gun manufacturers (among others) and walks the reader through the various campaigns the litigation elite have waged against Dow Corning, asbestos suppliers, and others. Olson also examines other litigation phenomena such as how TV newsmagazines act as mouthpieces for trial attorneys and how attorneys manipulate our jury system to achieve huge verdicts for their clients. Particularly interesting to me was the chapter entitled "The Jackpot Belt" where Olson analyzes trends in jury awards in states from Texas to Florida (the Jackpot Belt supposedly stretches from Beaumont to Pensacola) where juries have been especially generous in punitive damage awards. I would recommend this book for anyone from lawyers, to law students or even to the layperson with an interest in this subject. Olson avoids technical, complex language and jargon and the book is highly readable.

The author writes that in the 1970s legal writings began proposing that judges create some new rights to sue noting that some thinkers in the law schools and elsewhere had come to see lawsuits as a king of surrogate social insurance, identifying deep pockets from which accident victims might obtain compensation. In addition, law schools began to encourage lawyers to be entrepreneurs. Under this philosophy "...more than half of the nation's GNP would be routed through lawyer's offices. A lot would stay there."The author states that trial lawyers are usurping the power vested by the Constitution in an elected Congress. He develops his thesis by reviewing the methods used by trial lawyers in litigation involving the tobacco settlement, gun control, silicone breast implants, asbestos, etc. In addition, the book discusses how some states, referred to as "The Jackpot Belt," are overly supportive of class action lawsuits and trial lawyers. In fact one southern town has class action lawsuits as its major industry and their wealthy trial lawyers are its elite citizens.The text notes that the class action/mass tort litigation business is basically unregulated with the Washington Post newspaper lamenting that "we now have government by and for lawyers," who had "hijacked the public policy for private enrichment" in a "daring inventive and brazen" campaign. The author notes that all pretense of legitimacy was tossed aside when the trial bar referred to itself as a Fourth Branch of government, and notes that "...we allowed the Fourth Branch to seize the historic powers of government while escaping the long-evolved constraints on the abuse of that power."While lamenting the rule of lawyers, the author notes that rise of the class action lawyers has been facilitated by the failure of congress and legislators to address critical social issues. However, the book ends stating "The new rule of lawyers brings us many evils, but perhaps the greatest is the way it robs the American people of the right to find its own future and pursue its own destiny."The reader may not agree with the author's approach or all of his conclusions. Nevertheless, this book is worth taking time to read.

In this, his third outstanding book on problems with the American civil justice system, Olson takes on the newest class of billionaires in our economy, the class action litigators. He thoroughly documents the reasons for the rapid rise of influence by the plaintiff's bar, and how that power has translated into the development of a Fourth Branch of government.The original intent of the contingency fee system was to permit persons of limited means access to the courts if they had been wronged. Fast forward to the tobacco lawsuits which paid billions of dollars to the politically connected few tort lawyers who were working on behalf of the states, or so they said. The states could have saved billions by hiring the attorneys on an hourly basis, but the state attorneys general had debts to pay to their political supporters.Asbestos litigation has bankrupted whole sectors of the economy, while most of the actual significant injuries occured to workers in the government contracted shipyards during WWII. Since the government cannot be sued, everyone else in the manufacturing and distribution chain has to pay.More billions were paid out to lawyers and supposed victims of silicone breast implants before good science conclusively proved that there was no connection between the implants and increased incidence of disease. Despite this there is no recourse against the lawyers, their junk science experts, or the wrongly paid plaintiffs.Plaintiff's lawyers have cleverly arranged to try their class action suits in friendly, if ill-informed, jurisdictions, mostly in the rural south, "The Jackpot Belt". Olson proposes that multistate class action suits be forced into Federal courts to prevent such venue shopping and curb the influence of provincialism. Federal courts are also more immune to influence peddling and less tolerant of lawyers' demagoguery.Another reform that he proposes is segregating liability from damage awards, much as guilt and punishment are segregated in criminal trials. He believes that judges would be less likely to grant runaway and unreasonable awards than inexperienced lay juries.This is a very well written, well reasoned and timely piece of work. It should be required reading for all legislators at both the Federal and state levels.

There's an old Latin maxim that asks, "Who watches the watchmen?" I just finished _The Rule of Lawyers_ and Olson should be thanked for piecing together more than a mere series of judicial outrages. Olson shows how trial lawyers have syphoned billions of dollars into their own pockets while manipulating legislatures and judges in order to shield themselves from accountability. This is nothing short of an assault on the Constitution. Every American who cares about the future of the country (please forgive the purple prose, but I'm serious here) needs to read this book.