When I heard University of Pennsylvania law professor Shaun Ossei-Owusu on Strict Scrutiny recently, I knew I needed to talk to him. His new book, Law on Trial: An Unlikely Insider Reckons with Our Legal System (available across all major platforms including Bookshop.org, Amazon, Apple Books, and Spotify), exposes the many ways that law school education and the legal profession actually perpetuate the injustices that people become lawyers to try to fix.
Legal education, Shaun explained, gives students a tragically necessary skill — the ability to translate real social problems into legal categories, much like a doctor has to translate pain into a diagnosis. But too often, the human, social, and moral consequences get lost in that translation. He uses torts as an example: law schools teach about individual negligence, while two of the biggest sources of harm in society — state violence and domestic violence — get cordoned off as something else.
We had a rich conversation about the role of politics in legal decision-making (especially in the Roberts Court); how labor law, which was already too difficult to enforce, has been even further weakened; why public interest lawyers shouldn’t be immune from honest criticism; and how progressives focused so much on winning legal battles over civil rights that it drew energy away from the movement organizing needed to push for deeper and more lasting change.
