Abstract:
Joe De Ritis held the lowliest job in legal services, as a staff attorney in a small-town public defenders office in Pennsylvania’s crumbling Pocono mountains resort area. There, he watched in revulsion as judges, lawyers, public officials and his own colleagues ignored, nullified, and even lied­ often in official proceedings, sometimes in judicial opinions­ about fundamental criminal rights, the nature and
interpretation of evidence, and the civil rights guarantees of not one but two constitutions, Federal and State. Out of that experience and his
own knowledge of constitutional analysis and mankind’s legal history, he reached a startling conclusion: the fifteen-century-old Anglo-American common law is a failure.