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[Thomas Geoghegan] possesses a felicitous writing style that can marry anecdote and analysis.
Geoghegan’s insouciant style makes fresh the ins and outs of an attorney’s day and the way lawyers handle each other and judges. . . . A letter to young law-school grads seeking to change the world.
Geoghegan writes with endearing verve and worldly good humor even when bemoaning what he regards as the worst excesses of the criminal justice system. . . . What most enlivens the book, however, is a passion for justice that is found in precious few attorneys in America today.
In America’s Court
How a Civil Lawyer Who Likes to Settle Stumbled into a Criminal Trial
paperback
$15.95 / £9.95
In America’s Court is the thoughtful, witty story of labor lawyer Thomas Geoghegan’s introduction to the world of criminal law. After twenty years of civil practice, in which “complex litigation” fades slowly into settlement, he is unprepared for the much quicker justice of state criminal court when he assists in the defense of a twenty-two-year-old who, at age fifteen, was sentenced to forty years in prison for acting as the unarmed lookout in a botched holdup. In an America that now routinely imprisons kids as adults, he comes to see this small case as a basic test of human rights.
The case leads Geoghegan to reevaluate his own career as a civil lawyer and the ways he might use the law to effect social change. Written with the author’s trademark intelligence and humor, In America’s Court is a compelling narrative and a candid look at the justice that our society provides for its citizens.
Thomas Geoghegan’s essays and commentary have appeared in the New Republic, the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Chicago Tribune, and Slate, among other publications. He is the author of The Secret Lives of Citizens and Which Side Are You On?, which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and received a special citation from the PEN/Martha Albrand Award judges. Geoghegan is a practicing attorney in Chicago.
Spring 2003
paperback
5 1/4 x 7 1/2, 224 pages
978-1-56584-817-7
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