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Lawyers In The Mist: The Golden Age Of Legal Nostalgia, Marc Galanter
Lawyers In The Mist: The Golden Age Of Legal Nostalgia, Marc Galanter
Dickinson Law Review (2017-Present)
No one watching the contemporary furor over the litigation explosion and lawsuits devouring America can fail to be impressed by the power of folklore to overwhelm workaday organized social knowledge. Time and again, the protestations of bean-counters and skeptics are vanquished by stories about perverse institutions peopled by malingering plaintiffs, greedy lawyers, capricious jurors, and arrogant judges, proving yet again that it is not what is so that matters, but what people—at least for the moment—think is so. Tenacious belief may not make it so, but can have powerful effects.
In this essay I address another cluster of folklore about …