The Nonsense Factory: The Making and Breaking of the American Legal System

(Hardback)

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Does the American legal system work as advertised Does it even work at all

News about abusive police, rotting prisons, and Congressional corruption all point to deep problems. In THE NONSENSE FACTORY, Bruce Cannon Gibney shows that these defects are not aberrations, but the product of the legal system's ceaseless, heedless growth. The whole factory of the law--legislation, enforcement, judgment, and corrections--has become so ambitious, yet so ignorant, that it cannot help but produce endless problems. The law sprawls into unknowable chaos, and citizens find themselves tangled in a web of obligations they cannot possibly honor, and victims for the unscrupulous to easily exploit. We see this playing out daily in Donald Trump's America.

The legal crisis has become urgent. America is rapidly arriving at the point where no one can understand what law actually is or should do. The result is a system at war with itself, mutually distrustful and hostile in the extreme. The system can be salvaged; indeed, it must be. The risks of inaction are immense--the very stability of our country.

Reviews

"The Nonsense Factory is a provocative polemic on the sorry state of American law. Whether you chiefly blame the Supreme Court or Congress or law professors or We The People ourselves--and whether or not you buy into every count of his indictment--Gibney's book raises serious questions about how we govern ourselves."--David A. Kaplan, author of The Most Dangerous Branch: Inside the Supreme Court's Assault on the Constitution
"[A] sweeping new study of America's legal system."--Jeff Jacoby, Boston Globe
"A diligent, carefully considered overview of the law and its many facets.... Gibney is an insurrectionist with a heavy mind but a light heart.... His overarching intellectual project is a deeply admirable, and indeed, a patriotic one. He's willing to take a little heat to get some new ideas out there, and he's willing to make a few enemies in the process. By applying his deeply agile mind to the seemingly intractable obstacles of our democracy, he implicitly and crucially demonstrates the belief that real solutions exist."-- Lawyers, Guns, and Money
"A keen, lively deconstruction of the American legal system's seemingly countless flaws."
--Kirkus Reviews
"Gibney (A Generation of Sociopaths) boldly declares that these chaotic times have been long-developing in the legal realm.... A timely investigation of the 'Imperial Presidency' considers the history and dangers of executive power. Ultimately, Gibney calls for structural reform and corrective actions.... Civic-minded readers .... will enjoy this ambitious and wry polemic on America's legal system."--Library Journal
"Gibney is ... often funny, and his criticisms are serious, well-argued, and provocative."--Publishers Weekly
"Law schools seeking a good overview could save themselves the trouble and just assign entering students [The Nonsense Factory].... A plain-English "wide-angle critique" of the legal system... Ambitious.... Non-lawyers and many attorneys, too, will certainly have a better sense of what ails our justice system after reading this book."-- Washington Post
"Monumental and hugely entertaining...smart, funny, incisive...."--"Good Law Bad Law" podcast with Aaron Freiwald
"Really interesting book... stirring the pot."
--The Young Turks

Author Bio

Bruce Cannon Gibney is the author of A Generation of Sociopaths: How the Baby Boomers Betrayed America. A venture capitalist and writer, Gibney began as an attorney specializing in securities litigation and financial regulation. He was an early investor in PayPal, and later joined Founders Fund and co-founded Carmenta Management. He and his colleagues have funded Facebook, Spotify, Palantir Technologies, SpaceX, Lyft, AirBnB, Coupang, and DeepMind.