'The Nonsense Factory'
Bruce Cannon Gibney, Hachette, 504 pages, $29. Last summer, Harvard Law School required its incoming class to complete a new online course designed to introduce them to the legal system before they arrived on campus. Other law schools seeking a good overview could save themselves the trouble and just assign entering students the latest book from attorney turned venture capitalist Bruce Cannon Gibney. In his 2017 debut polemic, "A Generation of Sociopaths," Gibney skewered baby boomers, and "The Nonsense Factory"critiques everything wrong with the legal system, starting with how it educates new lawyers. Gibney views the legal system's failings through the center-left prism of someone who has spent most of his career in finance at a hedge fund and leading Silicon Valley venture-capital firm. It is ambitious in scope if not necessarily groundbreaking, particularly for anyone deeply immersed in the legal system, but if only every serious book about law was this enjoyable. Gibney occasionally veers into tasteless language. He's at his most engaging when he applies his business mind to the civil justice system, for example questioning the wisdom of the legal system relying on generalist judges who may start the day with a murder case and end it with an intellectual-property dispute. He's less successful when examining Washington's dysfunctional lawmaking process. His solutions aren't always satisfying, but non-lawyers and many attorneys, too, will certainly have a better sense of what ails our justice system after reading this book, even if they are no closer to fixing it.
WASHINGTON POST
