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An Unlikely Insider Reckons with Our Legal System
by Shaun Ossei-Owusu
An insider's sharp critique of legal education and the legal profession, revealing why the system is far from impartial, starting in law school and extending to the corporate world, government, and public interest organizations.
The law promises justice. Too often, it delivers inequality. This contradiction raises a basic question: Why does a legal system that claims to stand for fairness and equality fail to uphold these ideals over and over?
In Law on Trial, legal scholar and Bronx native Shaun Ossei-Owusu draws on more than a decade of observation and reflection―first as a scholar of inequality, then as a law student, practicing lawyer, and now as an Ivy League law professor―to provide an unvarnished account of the legal system. He reveals that the promise of justice is too often a convenient fiction invoked by lawyers, recited by textbooks, and betrayed in practice.
Street crime gets the fist of the state; white-collar crime gets a gentle hand. Laws meant to protect women and minorities are increasingly turned against them. Immigrants face the law with only the thinnest protections, while the rights of people with disabilities are routinely ignored. And, most quietly, lawyer-driven corporate deals shutter small-town hospitals, deepening America's abandonment of the rural poor. These are not aberrations, but simply how law works in this country.
In this legal odyssey, Ossei-Owusu takes us inside law school classrooms where human suffering is reduced to abstract principles. He brings us to government offices where protecting cities can mean crushing the vulnerable. We go to Big Law conference rooms where power is exercised far from the communities most affected. At every step, he pulls back the curtain on legal education and the legal profession, creating a revelatory, unforgettable account of a system that touches all of us, in one way or another.
A book for nonlawyers, law students, and practicing lawyers alike, Law on Trial explains how a legal system dedicated to fairness is behind many of the social ills of our time, and shows how it can be fixed.
"Ossei-Owusu writes with ease and grace. This makes a cloistered world accessible to the lay reader and serves as an invaluable glimpse of how inequality is maintained in America." ―Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"A provocative work of legal advocacy that merits wide attention." ―Kirkus Reviews
"Law On Trial is an incisive, surprising, and deeply insightful account of how lawyers play a key role in sustaining inequality and injustice. Shaun Ossei-Owusu begins with this counterintuitive claim and then takes readers on an unforgettable journey through the training and practice of lawyers from his vantage point as an 'unlikely insider'―a young Black Ivy League law professor. He is one of the most important legal scholars of his generation, and the book is both brilliant and highly readable. You'll never think of law the same way again after reading it." ―Imani Perry, author of South to America: A Journey Below the Mason-Dixon to Understand the Soul of a Nation
"In this sharp and engaging work, Shaun Ossei-Owusu―one of the nation's leading scholars of the legal profession―delivers a bold critique of lawyers and the law schools that shape them." ―James Forman Jr., author of Locking Up Our Own
This information about Law on Trial was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Shaun Ossei–Owusu is a professor of law at the University of Pennsylvania, where he teaches and writes about criminal law, civil rights, legal ethics, the welfare state, and the business of law firms. He has held appointments at Princeton, Harvard, and Columbia. He lives in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
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