With Justice for None: Destroying an American Myth

by Gerry Spence

“A scathing indictment of how law is taught, practiced, and administered in this country . . . One of the best books ever written on the law.”— The Denver Post
 
Renowned trial lawyer Gerry Spence takes an in-depth look at the American justice system and reveals a terrible If you don’t have power or money, then you likely won’t receive justice either. The wealthy buy their way out of trouble, while the poor are punished. In an effort to combat this corruption, the author devises a number of reforms, tackling issues in every area of the system from law school to the courtroom.
 
“Passionately eloquent and innovative, trial attorney Spence here argues the evils of the justice system itself and its abuse by monied interests such as corporations, ‘the most cruel, calculating, and accomplished criminals of all time.’”— Publishers Weekly

Genres: Law, Legal, Nonfiction

370 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1989

About the author

Gerry Spence is a trial lawyer in the United States. In 2008, he announced he would retire, at age 79, at the end of the Geoffrey Fieger trial in Detroit, MI. Spence did not lose a criminal case in the over 50 years he practiced law. He started his career as a prosecutor and later became a successful defense attorney for the insurance industry. Years later, Spence said he "saw the light" and became committed to representing people, instead of corporations, insurance companies, banks, or "big business."

Reviews

[Eric_W · Rating 4 out of 5]

In 1983, Harvard's President Bok charged that the law schools of America were geared to supply new and exclusive talent for corporate firms that, in turn, deliver quality representation only to the wealthy and powerful. Bok further asserted that the poor and the middle class find their access to the courts blocked by prohibitive costs and a bewildering array of complex rules and procedures. Gerry Spence, a thoroughly experienced trial lawyer, quotes Bok in a this eloquent polemic. that attacks the legal profession.

Occasionally witty and anecdotal, Spence argues persuasively that the legal profession has surrendered itself to a quest for power by defending the rich and powerful. He insists law schools attract and retain precisely the wrong kind of person. He wants students to be filled with rage at injustice, to be people oriented rather than the academic types who score well on LSAT exams and who can accurately regurgitate cases, but who lack compassion for their fellow human beings. He states that most law students leave school without elementary trial skills; indeed, a student can graduate without ever having to write a contract. While some of Spence's sweeping generalizations left me uncomfortable as to their accuracy his book is provocative and timely. He makes many suggestions to change the system.

[Guillermo Galvan · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is another great title in the name of tearing down our American myths. Gerry Spence, a hall of fame lawyer with 35 years of experience, boldly sets forth how there is no justice for anyone except the ultra rich.

The book is told in two parts. Part one "Justice For None" underlines what's wrong with our law schools, lawyers, judges, and juries. He draws from cases, some of which he was the lawyer, to show how ordinary people victimized by corporate crime and medical malpractice are constantly denied justice before they even step into a courtroom. Likewise Spence analyzes how the entire justice system has been corrupted starting with law school entrance exams designed to weed out minorities and conscientious individuals. And in the end, the resulting system feeds on our lives and liberty in the name of profit.

Part two "Justice For All" takes each aspect covered in part one and shows how it can be mended so that justice can prevail for all citizens. Spence's ideas are radical because their aim is revolution against the corporate anarchy of our time that is allowed to kill literally countless people with virtually no consequence. Even if you don't agree with his solutions, you can appreciate his opening a dialogue about how we can realistically change things. What if we reclaim our airwaves and charge these billion-dollar networks a proper fee? What if corporations had to disclose past crime each time they aired a commercial the way cigarettes must include a warning about lung cancer?

WARNING: This company has been found guilty of embezzling 20 million dollars from its customers last year.

Kinda makes it difficult to put some catchy trust slogan after that, right?

Spence is also a philosopher about our human rights for spiritual and environmental freedom. He shares his ideas in humble and straight forward manner that encourages the reader to nurture his own and express them. He truly captures the essence of freedom of speech as our most valuable right because the exchange of ideas dashes away all psychological bondage.

When our corporate dictatorship falls, the future generations will reflect on men like Gerry Spence.

[Paul Gaya Ochieng Simeon Juma · Rating 4 out of 5]

Good books always play a vital role in our lives and conduct. Garry Spence has written a wonderful book. It is ethical, reformative, and academic. Everyone in the Legal profession will pick something from it. It speaks to law students, law schools, judges, lawyers, government, and even corporations. It's value is priceless.

My country (Kenya) is still suffering from various social and political challenges. We need lawyers in these difficult times. Not only, lawyers, but we need lawyers with integrity. Unfortunately the crop of lawyers in my country are the ones who leave a bad taste in your mouth. The rot is present in the Bar, Executive, Judiciary, and Parliament.

Corruption has become the order of the day. We are so corrupt to the extent that we are shocked when we find or see somebody complaining. Our prosecutors and Judges extort money from accused persons in return for favors and withdrawal of cases. Our lawyers are paying magistrates and judges for favorable judgements. The institutions that are meant to check them are equally as corrupt. We pay for the justice we deserve and afterwards, the advocate will run away with the money you were awarded.

Garry Spence, I have heard your voice. We have to change our legal profession and elevate it to the status it is supposed to be. Change should start from the classroom as we move upwards. I am currently disgusted with the state of the legal profession in Kenya. There is no justice to the poor man. Everywhere he turns to he is thwarted. Litigants are everywhere buying there rights. Since it is not fashionable to have integrity, those who try to maintain some ethical standards are shunned, despised, and persecuted. We have lost ourselves to money. We have sold our souls to material wealth. Everywhere one goes, ome can feel the stench of corruption in his nose. However, with good books from good lawyers we get some sense pf direction.

[Nolan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Some potential readers might glance at the 1989 copyright date and dismiss this book as outdated. Yet it resonates more deeply in 2026 than ever before. Spence argues that justice fades away in a world where heartless multinational conglomerates reduce it to mere entries on a balance sheet.

“The truth is there is no justice in America for the people. And there never has been—not from the beginning. There is no justice for the wealthy surgeon at Mercy Hospital, or the scrubwoman who cleans up after him. There is no justice for the dregs of our society who plague us with their crimes, or for the workers, or for women. There is no justice even for Jerry Falwell, who loves God and votes Republican, or for the poor in the ghettos. They've never heard of it. There is no justice for the farmer who works his guts out for the banks. And don't forget the children—there has never been justice for them.
“We search for justice in fearful places—in cities encrusted with crime, in the workplace where people are mere units on the production line, in a world where justice, if it exists, has become only another commodity for sale.
“What has happened to justice in America? There stands the courthouse, solid, stately. Inside, we still find great judges, men and women dedicated to the law, presiding over our cases. In the courtrooms, we hear our hometown lawyers pleading to a jury of our neighbors. But there will be no justice, for a new king dominates justice in America, a sovereign whose soul is pledged to business and whose heart is geared to profit. The new king, an amorphous
agglomeration of corporations, of banks and insurance companies
and mammoth multinational financial institutions, maintains a prurient
passion for money and demands a justice of its own, one that
is stable and predictable, one that fits into columns and accounts
and mortality tables, one that is interpretable in dollars, so that a
little justice is a few dollars and a lot of justice many. The new king
cannot deal with the soul, the fire, and the unpredictability of human
justice. Profit is the lifeblood of business, and if there is no profit
in justice, people are not likely to receive it.”

Spence devotes much of his second chapter—with near-poetic flair—to exploring why the U.S. overflows with lawyers and why so many Americans despise them.

“Brigham Young, upon establishing his Utopia in the Utah desert, characterized lawyers as ‘a stink in the nostrils of every Latter-day Saint,’ and described the courtroom as ‘a cage of unclean birds, a den and kitchen of the devil.’"

Spence holds the nation's law schools accountable for poorly preparing young lawyers.

“A trial lawyer is a fighter, one struggling to accomplish justice under the great disability of a legal education. Whether he has graduated from Harvard or the University of Wyoming, it is mostly the person who accounts for the successful trial lawyer. Young lawyers ask me, ‘How can I get better in the courtroom?’ They know something vital is missing. For although they were chosen when most were not, and although they have endured the torment of cruel professors and the agony of boring classes, and survived the punishment of the bar examination, they still suspect they are mysteriously wanting—but how? Why?
“They have been taught by their professors that feelings are exhibited only by the intellectually puny; they are not to be trusted. I tell them they must learn to feel again. The ability to feel is the principal distinction between man and machine. Justice itself is a feeling. If one cannot feel, one cannot understand his client's case. If one cannot feel, one cannot understand the jury—or even the judge, for contrary to the suspicions of many, judges do feel. The lawyer who thinks the words but does not feel the words will seem disingenuous to jurors who themselves feel, but who, despite his words, are able to sense that the lawyer does not.
“We have injured our young, and now we wish them to run fast and long. We have frightened them and made nodding sycophants of them, and now we wish them to fight with style and courage. We teach the young like we program computers, and then complain they do not perform like human beings.”

Spence boldly blames the nation's law schools for failing to train true fighters.

“Most Americans know little more of our law schools than what they've seen of television's razor-tongued Professor Kingsfield of Paper Chase, whose great delight is to sadistically reduce the hapless law student to a shambles of blubbering sentences and non sequiturs.
“We laugh. The professor will not be satisfied until the student is
‘thinking like a lawyer’—that is, thinking like him. Until the student
conforms, he will be humiliated and punished. He will learn
to be polite and passive, not to speak out, not to inquire, although
he has an inquiring mind, not to invent, although his greatest joy
is to create. Those whom we send to school to become our warriors
will not learn the fine art of fighting, but how to patronize and to
play along. It is a pity we so deform plastic minds and so cripple
young psyches.”

Spence dismantles the myth that juries serve as the ultimate shield against tyranny. He contends that judges now tightly control juries, instructing them on legal nuances and expecting them to follow like automatons. He revisits the Karen Silkwood case, where his 1979 jury verdict against Kerr-McGee Nuclear awarded massive punitive damages for plutonium contamination—only for the corporate-state machine to shrink the family’s eventual settlement to roughly thirteen cents on the original jury dollar, perfectly capturing the chasm he decries.

Chapter six sketches the judicial landscape of Spence’s era. He critiques the Missouri Plan—a purportedly nonpartisan method for selecting judges who later face public approval or rejection—and condemns the vast sway corporate America holds over the courts.

“I have known many a judge who was bribed—by the tears of an anguished father or the wailing of a motherless child or the quiet plea of an old friend. But in an entire career, I never knew a judge who I believed was bribed by raw money. Yet most judges I know are beholden to Power—by that I mean unalterably pledged to the dominant force of the system. Sometimes the dominant force is public opinion and sometimes the ward boss, but in America it has more often been the power of those colossal corporate creatures— those paper omnivores that feed on our culture and our lives and
that often have taken possession, one way or another, of the lawyers
who become our judges. When justice is defeated, whether by an
overt bribe or when the judge, because of who he is, honestly views
justice through the eyes of the corporation so that the just claims
of people are more easily defeated, the result is the same. When
judges are saturated with notions respectful of the rights of man,
and join in the singing of hymns that glorify humans over things
and people over profits, there will be little demand for the likes of
the lawyer in Chicago whose business it was to bribe judges.”

Spence refuses to merely critique the system. He outlines reforms from revamping law schools to overhauling the judiciary. He advocates criminalizing corporate misconduct—handcuffing CEOs—and pinning responsibility on top executives. In 2026, his worries about television's pervasive influence seem exaggerated, as Americans have shifted to more fragmented online media and ideas.

I often parted ways with Spence on various points. Still, his alarms about elitist overreach and injustice for the powerless ring true—and rereading him this year sparked fresh admiration for the way his fiery prose still cuts through the noise of today’s corporate scandals. His stance boils down to this:

“Mine is not a religion of economics or one of the spirit, although I am interested in both. Mine is a religion of ideas. We ought not worship the dead, whether they be men, ideas, or structures— whether they be Marx, Christ, or their hopes for mankind that have been stultified into dogma. We ought not bow down to the corporation, or enter the infinite emptiness of its mansions. We ought to cherish our visions. Justice itself is merely our idea, and its only limits are the boundaries of those creative minds that constantly strive to perfect it—of a people resolved to a simple notion: Justice for all.”

Dive into this five-star read and see if Spence’s vision ignites your own fight for justice. It’s worth every page.

[Alisa · Rating 3 out of 5]

Read this awhile ago, 1992 I think and recall it being quite good at the time. He's opinionated and as he is known to do makes a good case for his thoughts and writes intelleigently and persuasively. I had never heard of Gerry Spence until this was recommended by a friend. Glad I read it.

[Craig Bolton]

With Justice for None by Gerry Spence (1990)