Bad Law

The New York Times bestselling author brings his trademark legal acumen and passionate snark to offer a brilliant takedown of ten incredibly bad pieces of legislation that are causing way too much misery to millions

“If it were up to me, I’d treat every law passed before the Voting Rights Act of 1965 as presumptively unconstitutional. The government of this country was illegitimate when it ruled over people who had no ability to choose the rules.”
—from the introduction to Bad Law

While Elie Mystal may not endorse any laws created before all Americans were entitled to vote for our lawmakers, in Bad Law he hones in on ten of what he considers the most egregiously awful laws on the books today. These are pieces of legislation that are making life worse, not better, for Americans, and that—he argues with clarity, eloquence, and paradigm-shifting legal insight—should be repealed completely.

On topics ranging from abortion and immigration to voting rights and religious freedom, we have chosen rules to live by that do not reflect the will of most of the people. With respect to our decision to make a law that effectively grants immunity to gun manufacturers, for example, Mystal writes, “We live in the most violent, wealthy country on earth not in spite of the law; we live in a first-person-shooter video game because of the law.”

But, as the bestselling author of Allow Me to Retort points out, these laws do not come to us from on high; we write them, and we can and should unwrite them. In a marvelous and original takedown spanning all the hot-button topics in the country today, one of our most brilliant legal thinkers points the way to a saner tomorrow.