Law on trial An unlikely insider reckons with our legal system

The ingenious debut treatise from legal scholar Ossei-Owusu asserts that the ways in which American lawyers are schooled and trained are a crucial factor in maintaining the inequities of the U.S. legal system. Having grown up in a Black working-class family in the Bronx, as a young law student Ossei-Owusu perceived himself as an outsider looking into the legal profession, and carefully observed its goings-on. Recapping his experiences as a law student, practicing lawyer, and now law professor, Ossei-Owusu points to discrepancies he encountered between the legal field's claims of impartial justice and actual on-the-ground practices, which typically reinforced marginalization of minorities. He presents these gaps as not just a matter of hypocrisy but entrenched dissonance in the legal profession's worldview. Starting with concepts typically covered in the first year of law school, Ossei-Owusu shows how students "are taught to approach legal problems with a distance that can push human suffering to the margins." This separation between legal theory and lived experience, reinforced by lessons in "thinking like a lawyer," only grows as graduates advance in their profession, becoming judges and policymakers. Though his account delves deeply into legal abstractions, 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. (Apr.)