Does the American legal system work as advertised? Does it even work at all?

News about abusive police, rotting prisons, and Congressional corruption all point to deep problems. In THE NONSENSE FACTORY, Bruce Cannon Gibney shows that these defects are not aberrations, but the product of the legal system's ceaseless, heedless growth. The whole factory of the law--legislation, enforcement, judgment, and corrections--has become so ambitious, yet so ignorant, that it cannot help but produce endless problems. The law sprawls into unknowable chaos, and citizens find themselves tangled in a web of obligations they cannot possibly honor, and victims for the unscrupulous to easily exploit. We see this playing out daily in Donald Trump's America.

The legal crisis has become urgent. America is rapidly arriving at the point where no one can understand what law actually is or should do. The result is a system at war with itself, mutually distrustful and hostile in the extreme. The system can be salvaged; indeed, it must be. The risks of inaction are immense--the very stability of our country.