WASHINGTON — Shaun Ossei-Owusu published the book 'Law on Trial: An Unlikely Insider Reckons With Our Legal System,' critiquing systemic inequities embedded in American legal education and practice. The 432-page volume, released by W.W. Norton & Company, draws on Ossei-Owusu’s personal and professional journey from poverty in the Bronx to roles as a public defender, a lawyer at a major law firm, and now a professor at the University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School. He received both a Ph.D. and a J.D. from the University of California, Berkeley.
Ossei-Owusu argues that the American legal system itself bears responsibility for inequities that are an unwelcome by-product of its operations. He considers the phrase 'Equal justice under law,' chiseled into the facade of the United States Supreme Court, to be aspirational at best. In the book, he writes that law schools 'confer undue legitimacy on the American legal system in part by pushing questions about money, politics, power and history to the side.'
According to Ossei-Owusu, legal training 'can strip away the sociopolitical, economic and moral factors that shape lawmaking and legal inequality.' He writes that seven major law school courses 'treat emotional detachment like a professional imperative' and that students are rarely exposed to discussions of 'the role of special interest groups like police unions or race-baiting, tough on crime politicians.' Part of their training, he says, 'involves processing human problems into technical questions.'
Ossei-Owusu also examines the work of corporate lawyers, particularly in hospital consolidations. He writes that these transactions, common in mergers and acquisitions practices, frequently lead to the closure of healthcare facilities, cuts to services, and the elimination of community health programs. 'These lawyers created the legal frameworks that make these outcomes economically rational for their clients' while overlooking or soft-pedaling the likely consequences, he notes. The effects, he adds, are most directly felt in rural and low-income urban areas where healthcare needs are especially acute. He asserts that 'these conditions make it possible for blatant wrongs to become legally contestable or nonissues.' Ossei-Owusu acknowledges that his political leanings fall to the left of center and writes that lawyers 'exist in professional ecosystems that reward technical competence while actively discouraging moral reflection.'
No independent assessment of Shaun Ossei-Owusu’s claims was available.