A Nation of Adversaries: How the Litigation Explosion Is Reshaping America - Softcover

Garry, Patrick M.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0306455641 ISBN 13: 9780306455643

Publisher: Plenum Pr, 1997

Synopsis

A Nation of Adversaries: How the Litigation Explosion Is Reshaping America brilliantly examines why our culture has been increasingly crowding courthouses and fueling the growth of the lawyer population, pitting us against each other. Dr. Patrick Garry, an expert on the effect of the courts on American society, insightfully points out that our growing litigant-oriented mindset is reinforcing a self-centered culture of undue expectation and entitlement. The workplace, the classroom, the bedroom, and even the playground are becoming more combative. With increasing gridlock, acrimony, and ideological warfare, the political arena has especially come to resemble more a courtroom than an arena for concordance. The values supporting democracysuch as compromise and consensus - have been subverted by tenacity and aggressiveness. In light of the new litigation democracy, the individual's right to sue is valued more than his or her right to vote.
The author also analyzes how the publicity bestowed upon specific lawsuits "teaches" the public to identify and assert new ways of being a victim. As a result, employees are victims of their employers, children victims of their parents, and students victims of their teachers. In encouraging new types of victim-plaintiffs and promising lucrative rewards to potential victims, litigation also fuels the fire of therapy culture. For a society obsessed with psychic healing and emotional recovery, litigation is seen as a logical continuation of the healing process begun in a therapist's office. Increasingly open to novel theories of psychological injuries, the courts are reinforcing the therapeutic bent so prevalent in sensationalistic talk shows and recovery programs.
A Nation of Adversaries is a candid look at litigation's invasion into our once formally mindful society, and is a shrewd commentary on the creation of a new culture of identity in America.

About this title

About the Author:

Patrick M. Garry, Ph.D., J.D., has taught at St. John's University and the University of Minnesota, and has been a visiting scholar at the Columbia University School of Law.

From Booklist:

Legal and constitutional scholar Garry examines America's adversarial culture. Far too many of us, he argues, are always on the lookout for some actionable offense no matter how minor. As a nation, we feel ourselves entitled to whatever settlement we can wrest from a plaintiff because of a growing sense of victimhood. We figure we are owed. America's declining social and personal values are one factor here, although Garry also documents a legal profession bent on litigation because it is so lucrative. He also lays blame on a media apparatus that treats court cases like sporting events, where the point isn't truth but who's winning. Depressingly accurate, although one wonders why Garry's analysis left out some very central players: corporations and organizations that won't do the right thing, making litigation or the threat of it about the only way to achieve some sort of justice. Brian McCombie

About this edition

• Publisher: Plenum Pr
• Publication date: 1997
• ISBN 10: 0306455641
• ISBN 13: 9780306455643
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 218