Law on Trial: An Unlikely Insider Reckons with Our Legal System

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.