A Nation of Adversaries: How the Litigation Explosion Is Reshaping America

by Patrick M. Garry

"A book on a timely and powerful theme....While others have documented the damage that litigation does to our economy, Garry wants to show us its cost to our character as a nation". -- Walter Olson, Author, The Litigation ExplosionThroughout our history, America has been shaped by a series of transforming events and institutions -- the Pilgrims' Puritanism, the promise of Jacksonian democracy, the staggering rise of corporate capitalism, and the advent of electronic media. Today, a new strain of litigious behavior veers our culture away from the proverbial "melting pot" to one in which fellow citizens become bitter adversaries. Law is becoming the next American frontier where litigious pioneers try to stake out new opportunities for wealth and fame.A Nation of Adversaries brilliantly examines how the litigation explosion has singed our culture by needlessly crowding courthouses and fueling the growth of the lawyer population. Dr. Patrick Garry, an expert on the effect of the courts on American society, insightfully points out how our increasingly litigant-oriented mindset is reinforcing a self-centered culture of undue expectation and entitlement. He offers a blistering look at litigation's invasion into our once formally mindful society. Anyone interested in new trends of human behavior, as well as professionals in sociology, the legal profession, behavior therapy, and clinical psychology, will find this a shrewd commentary on the creation of a new culture of identity in America.

232 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1997

About the author

Whenever she could find a few spare moments, usually late at night, my mother read. She loved books. To her, reading was both a staple and luxury of life. Because of her example, we all became avid readers. And I became a writer.


My mother was my one consistent reader...and editor. She compiled the indexes for my early law and history books. I didn't even know how to construct an index, but my mother figured it out.

She supported all my writing, but she seemed particularly pleased when, after years of publishing books on law and history, I began writing fiction.

My first novel, "A Bomb Shelter Romance," involved a comedy about an eccentric family in a small town in the Midwest. After she read the manuscript, I could see the questioning look on my mother's face. Perhaps she worried that the family in the novel represented her own family--and maybe it did. It was then that she gave me some advice: try to write about things that really matter.

It took me 13 novels to fully follow that advice, which I think I finally did with my latest, "The Encounters of Quintas Livius." This novel combines history, faith and fiction. It presents a story of an agnostic Roman tax clerk caught up in the miracles of Jesus as he makes his way to Jerusalem.

Faith plays a vital role in many people's lives. But faith involves mysteries; and comprehending mysteries requires imagination, not facts. Consequently, our imagination can be a valuable tool in strengthening or understanding faith. "The Encounters of Quintas Livius" shows just how that tool might be used.

Mom, I hope I finally got it right.

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The host of a national book review radio program has called Patrick Garry the best undiscovered writer in America. But Patrick is unique in another respect. He writes about themes and ideas that are often absent in the works of contemporary American novelists.

Garry’s novels reaffirm life and the struggle of individuals to live their lives in ways that rise above mere materialism and the stranglehold of destructive temptations. In A Bridge Back, he writes about characters who never quite lose their desire for redemption, no matter how much guilt they feel for the mistakes of the past. Confronting the past can lead to a discovery of truth, which can then lead to the only true freedom. And once the enslavement to fear is ended, a rediscovery of love becomes possible.

Life can be simpler, and yet more heroic, than is often portrayed in the modern media, which can immerse us in a flood of all that can go wrong with life, rather than clarify for us what lies at the core of life—what defines it and makes it worth living. Garry's novels seek to rescue us from that confusion.