Twice in the past two days, I have either read or heard liberals defending John Edwards professional as a trial lawyer protecting the little guy by citing the popularity of John Grisham novels. For example, from Eleanor Clift on the MSNBC/Newsweek web site you can read this:
Anybody who has read a John Grisham novel knows that trial lawyers are often the only recourse ordinary people have in much of the country to right corporate wrongs.Actually, anybody who has read a John Grisham novel, and I confess I have read most of them, would come to a different conclusion. But don't take my word for it, Publisher's Weekly (via Amazon) had this to say about The King of Torts, a Grisham novel where he took on John Edward's brand of lawyering (emphasis mine):
Here's his most unusual legal thriller yet--a story whose hero and villain are the same, a young man with the tragic flaw of greed; a story whose suspense arises not from physical threat but moral turmoil, and one that launches a devastating assault on a group of the author's colleagues within the law. Mass tort lawyers are Grisham's target, the men (they're all men here, at least) who win billion-dollar class-action settlements from corporations selling bad products, then rake fantastic fees off the top, with far smaller payouts going to the people harmed by the products.In this novel, as in many by Grisham, the protagonist ends up rejecting law as a profession - sadder and wiser for the experience.
One would suspect that few, if any, John Grisham novels ever made it onto Eleanor Clift's summer reading list.
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