Making Law - by Richard C Cahn (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

This unique memoir is right up-to-date! The author warmly tells stories about six of his very public court cases and shows us what good things can be done when lawyers and judges have a little imagination, a sense of justice, and the willingness to do the right thing.

These adventure stories tell of regular people fighting for their rights, sometimes threatened by private groups, and sometimes by the government itself: a right-to-life group trying to take a frail baby away from her parents for surgery that they and their baby's doctors thought should wait; distraught parents and grandparents trying to get unwilling Justice Department officials in Washington to prosecute their former son-in-law for the murders of their loved ones; and a cadet at newly-co-ed West Point learning shortly before his scheduled graduation and commissioning that the Academy "brass" intend to expel him for "walking" with a female cadet, and how they all won! Those cases tell us why the subtitle, "A Memoir of Good Times" -- exactly fit.

A new chapter, entitled "Courting Disaster," presents a contrast, by picking up on the book's 2021 Epilogue that described how the American justice system was being undermined by former President Trump and his supporters. The new narrative tells a disheartening story of a Supreme Court -- supposedly the role model for all courts in the country -- whose reputation continues to drop, now ruled by a highly partisan group of six justices who are unable or unwilling to tear themselves away from the current Republican party line, not to mention some refusing to honor the principles that they agreed to in their own Code of Conduct. The author hasn't yet changed the book's subtitle, because he is hoping we can bring back those "good times." Maybe we can!

Don't be intimidated: this fascinating and friendly book is not written for lawyers. It makes the legal material easily understandable; it was written for all of us.