This was an eye opener for learning how many options were considered and how many compromises were made to resolve the regional and economic differences of the fifty-five delagates. Very sobering, to consider how close the USA came to making very different choices. Highly reccommended for all! This is real history, as recorded by Madison, exactly as it evolved.

This was an eye opener for learning how many options were considered and how many compromises were made to resolve the regional and economic differences of the fifty-five delagates. Very sobering, to consider how close the USA came to making very different choices. Highly reccommended for all! This is real history, as recorded by Madison, exactly as it evolved.

... I will never forget the day I discovered this book, nearly 20 years ago. After suffering through the first year of law school like Diogenes at a convention of used Chevrolet salesmen, I stumbled upon a paperback edition of the book on the bottom shelf in the dusty back corner of a tiny bookstore in Manhattan's upper west side. I literally trembled as I voraciously read each page. Here was a man trenchantly articulating everything I had felt about The Law during the previous year and deftly demolishing every pillar of the law's legitimacy.

From the blatant brainwashing techniques of legal education to the near-Papal reverence accorded to the justices of the Supreme Court, Rodell exposes The Law for what it is: an intellectually overwrought cult of obfuscation whose language "gives an appearance of substance to pure wind". (To quote Orwell in a different context -- political speech.)

I thought certainly he was some obscure young journalist or disaffected young lawyer. I could hardly contain myself though, when I turned to the introduction and found that the book had been written in 1939 and by no less a high priest than a faculty member, actually a professor, at the sanctum sanctorum of American legal education, The Yale Law School.

For those frustrated by our legal system, Rodell conveys to the "uninitiated", i.e. those who have not gone to law school, the absurdity of a system that works well for the lawyers but not very well at all for the clients. With a deft, Twainian wit, Rodell shows how lawyers are blinded to their own self-interest by the many props the legal system provides to legitimize itself.

The elaborate and effective indoctrination of law school is abetted by a host of props that endow the law with an august appearance of wisdom, integrity, and probity. From the black robes of the judge to the weighty, leather-bound casebooks and reporters of the law library, to the dazzling educational credentials of the legal elite, everything about the law bespeaks dignity and a kind of scientific precision of thought. With all these things arrayed before him, it is no wonder that the eager young law student quickly dismisses whatever doubts he may have of the law's legitimacy.

Rodell puts it brilliantly:

"There is no more pointed demonstration of the chasm between ordinary human thinking and the mental processes of the lawyer than in the almost universal reaction of law students when they first encounter The Law. They come to law school a normally intelligent, normally curious, normally receptive group. Day in and day out they are subjected to the legal lingo of judges, textbook writers, professors -- those learned The Law. But for months none of it clicks; there seems to be nothing to take hold of. These students cannot find anywhere in their past knowledge or experience a hook on which to hang all this strange talk of "mens rea" and "fee simple" and "due process" and other unearthly things. Long and involved explanations in lectures and lawbooks only make it all more confusing. The students know that law eventually deals with extremely practical matters like buying land and selling stock and putting thieves in jail. But all that they read and hear seems to stem not only from a foreign language but from a strange and foreign way of thinking. / Eventually their skepticism, founded though it is in stubborn and healthy skepticism, is worn down. Eventually they succumb to the barrage of principles and concepts and metaphysical refinements that go with them. And once they have forgotten their recent insistence on matter-of-factness, once they have begun to glory in their own agility at that mental hocus-pocus that had them befuddled a short while before, then they have become, in the most important sense, lawyers. Now they too, have joined that select circle of those who can weave a complicated intellectual riddle out of something so mundane as a strike or an automobile accident. Now it will be hard if not impossible ever to bring them back to that disarmingly direct way of thinking about the problems of people and society which they used to share with the average man before they fell in with the lawyers and swallowed The Law."

This book used to be sold in bulk for a buck and a half by HALT (Help Abolish Legal Tyranny), a Washington, D.C.-based group. I heard once that, after four printings, it was the most popular book ever written for non-lawyers about the law.

I have a long-standing interest in writing a biography of Rodell...

One of my son's favorite books. I cried the first time I read it and bought a copy for my son's half brother who lives far away. It does a great job explaining that Grace is still Fred's sister even though they live far apart.