Book Review : A Red-Hot Jeremiad on U.S. Justice

With Justice for None: Destroying an American Myth by Gerry Spence (Times Book: $18.95, 432 pages)

Gerry Spence is mad as hell, and he’s not going to take it any more.

Spence is the celebrated and intentionally colorful trial lawyer from Wyoming who is best known for his work on the Karen Silkwood case and the lawsuit brought by a former Miss Wyoming against Penthouse magazine. “With Justice for None” is Spence’s red-hot jeremiad on what’s wrong with the American judicial system and the American way of life. According to Spence, just about everything has gone wrong.

“I have spent most of my life representing ordinary people against the corporate giants. Sometimes I feel like the farmer on his 40 acres who has to take on God and all of the elements,” Spence proclaims. “Yet in this tangled, frantic, commercial society, can we expect justice except by the immutable rules of Darwin? In our system, money is power.” And Spence concludes: “The truth is there is no justice in America for the people.”

Spence styles himself as a latter-day prophet, full of hellfire and brimstone, and his firecracker prose is so much like the sputtering (and faintly demogogic) rhetoric of 19th-Century populism that his book often seems almost antique: “A new king dominates in America, a sovereign whose soul is pledged to business and whose heart is geared to profit. The new king, an amorphous agglomeration of corporations, of banks and insurance companies and mammoth multinational financial institutions, maintains a prurient passion for money and demands a justice of its own.”

Spence has nothing good to say about any aspect of the system in which he makes a living:

On lawyers, law students and law schools: “Today there are not too many lawyers, but too few-- too few of the right kind; too few who are trained as fighters; too few who will represent the people. . . . Skillfully, designedly, our young have made themselves salable to corporate America as replacement parts for the legal machine that grinds away in corporate law firms at lush hourly rates.”

Cases on Appeal

On judges and juries: “Judges, not juries, decide our cases in America. . . . More often than not, our cases on appeal are decided by a jury of judges composed of persons most lawyers would have challenged summarily from any jury panel. . . . The misery of the people seeking justice is no more vivid to the judges than reading about any other tragedy in the morning news. Judges see paper, not people. They see the lifeless briefs heaped upon their benches like great mountains in stark black and white.”

On insurance companies: “The insurance company is the God of Money. But the God of Money is not a benevolent god. It does not love us. It loves only its dollars, and it will hire the best lawyers in the land to keep them.”

Corporations Clobbered

On corporations: “That corporate America . . . cheerfully barters the lung tumors of its asbestos workers for profit, exchanges the brain damage of thousands of children from lead poisoning for earnings . . . and, without adequate testing, feeds carcinogens to an entire nation to secure a possible early market advantage, diminishes the likes of Charles Manson to a prankster at a Sunday school picnic.”

Spence devotes the second half of the book to his own plan for the reform of the legal system, which also seems to contemplate the remaking of the American way of life. He calls for “people’s” lawyers and “people’s” judges, whatever that means, who will bring a messianic future of perfect justice: “For them, the love of justice will become as real as the love of art, as the love of discovery, as the love of truth.” And Spence concedes that he is calling for nothing less than a revolution: “We must smash the trick mirrors,” he writes. “Change will come only when we have slammed the system up against them all and stared it down. . . .”

Happily enough for the reader, “With Justice for None” is not always or even mostly a catalogue of Spence’s complaints about the judicial system. Spence, like most seasoned trial lawyers, simply cannot resist the temptation to tell war stories, to relive an artful cross-examination or a triumphant closing argument, and to generally portray himself as the damned fine lawyer that he surely believes himself to be and probably is. (At one point, when Spence is contemplating why lawyers are regarded with such contempt, he confesses: “I hated being hated.”) And so the best moments in Spence’s book are introduced with the irresistible phrase: “Let me tell you a story.”

Gold-Plated Cogs

Still, Spence’s book is a war cry and not a collection of war stories. As a former “big-firm” attorney who now practices in a small law office, I appreciate how a lawyer like Spence feels when he comes up against the armies of high-priced lawyers who serve as gold-plated cogs in the legal machine. But I also know--and I’m quite sure that Gerry Spence knows--that the sole practitioner or the small firm can prevail over a wealthy and powerful adversary, and justice, however crude and incomplete, can be done. The fact is that Spence, as a true believer in perfect justice, does not yearn for the mere reform of the legal system--rather, he is a visionary for whom the imperfect justice of this world will never be enough.