*The Nonsense Factory: The Making and Breaking of the American Legal System*

That is the new book by Bruce Cannon Gibney, and it is one of my favorite books on the American legal system and one of my favorite books of this year.  Here is just one driblet from the work:

…only in America would an administrative law judge sue a local dry cleaner, claiming damages of $67 million for a lost pair of pants.

And this I had not known:

Worse, the legal content of any given state’s bar exam is not actually the law in that state.  The “multistate” part of the bar exam is exactly what it sounds like, but there is no such thing as “multistate” law: different states have different laws.  But even though the larger states, notably New York, California, and Texas, could create their own bar exams, almost all states use the synthetic law of a multistate exam, which is worse than useless: the right answer for the bar might not be the right answer in any state, which wastes students’ time and risks confusing them about the actual law.

I learned also that America has at least 940 legal journals.  Yet the Harvard Law Review had only 1,722 paid subscriptions for 2012, and the extremely well-known University of Virginia review had only 304 subscribers.

Between 1987 and 2017, staff available to Congress declined by about 30 percent.  The Capitol Police, however, expanded in numbers.  Congressional aides often make less than the janitors of the Senate.

OIRA, which is tasked with reviewing major regulations, typically has about 45 staffers.

The book offers up numerous anecdotes about how poorly some Supreme Court justices understand modern technology; Judge Scalia, for instance, was afraid that people could “capture” HBO signals from the airwaves.

…the entire federal judiciary costs about $7 billion, not even enough to buy 55 percent of the Gerald R. Ford aircraft carrier or fund federal health-care programs for fifty hours.”

Recommended, you can buy the book here.