Law Street
America’s Dysfunctional and Sometimes Corrupt Legal System
by
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I was born in the Netherlands. By the time I could read and write I witnessed horror and despair when in the very early morning of May 10, 1940, I watched German paratroopers, using their novel blitzkrieg strategy, drop out of the sky onto an island in the Maas river, part of the city of Rotterdam, where I lived. The island controlled the strategic bridges over the river, reason why the Germans occupied the island within hours of invading my country. The cacophony of grenades exploding everywhere, the rat-tat-tat of machine gunfire, the grief when I watched my own home go up in flames as the result of a Dutch marines counter attack on the German positions, and the utter fear and despair in the eyes of my parents left an indelible imprint on my life. The five-year German occupation which followed was despotic, murderous, full of constant fear and one of total arbitrariness. Watching the Jews first walk the streets with the Star of David sown on their lapels and then slowly and gradually disappear; hearing that the Germans had randomly picked up 20 people walking down the street and had executed them on the spot in retaliation for an attack by the Dutch underground and then having to walk for three days by the corpses of the executed people on my way to school; watching people collapse on the sidewalk and dying of hunger during the winter of 1944 when the big cities in Holland had run out of food; and then, when the allied food droppings began, watching desperate people run into the fields to grab the food in the process being killed by cans of food falling like rain from the Lancaster aircraft droning overhead; all this utter and unimaginable horror and cruelty instilled in me a thirst for justice and equity at a very young age. My high school years were fortunate. I attended a high school with a faculty with mostly PhDs in the subjects they were teaching. It was during those years that I developed my first real interest in, and admiration, for the United States. It was the result of an inter-disciplinary assignment of my French and history teachers. They made us read, translate and discuss a number of chapters from an early nineteenth century French book entitled De la Democratie en Amerique (translated into English under the name Democracy in America) a book that, because it could have been written today, made a lasting impression on me. Because we attended school six days a week, eleven months a year, I had by the time I graduated from high school been in school a full two to three years longer than the average graduating American high school student of today. Later in life I realized that my high school years—not university—were intellectually the most important formative years, the most important building blocks of my life. When I graduated from what we called the gymnasium, Holland was recovering from the devastation of the war and the German occupation. That recovery was in large measure aided by the Marshall Plan. In those days I was used to politicians and leaders wearing dark suits, white shirts and ties and I remember watching President Truman on Movietone News, the venerable news reel that, on Saturday afternoons, ran in movie theaters when I was growing up. Truman was filmed on the beach in Hawaii dressed in a Hawaiian shirt which, imagine this, was not tucked into his pants but flapping about him in the wind. I remember thinking how a man could be the President of such a great nation, how a statesman who had the wisdom of the Marshall Plan, a plan that in my opinion was the perfect fusion of enlightened self-interest and altruism, how could such a formidable leader of such a great and wise country not know that he ought to wear a dark suit, a white shirt and a tie. Despite the way Truman was dressed, it dawned on me in those formative years that America was different, that America was indeed exceptional. After two years of service in the military—Holland still had the draft when I graduated from high school—during which I graduated from officer school, I served with Nato in Germany. I subsequently attended the University of Leiden where I received a candidate of law (iuris candidatus) degree. Soon afterwards I left my native country, first to spend five years in Paris, France, as the Assistant European Director of an American NGO affiliated with the Fulbright Scholarship organization, and then to spend close to three years in Dublin, Ireland, as the Managing Director of Holland-America Line Ireland Ltd. Falling in love with an American young lady brought me to the shores of the United States of America where, living in five different states, east, west and in the intermountain west, my wife and I raised four children who all became leaders in business and academia. My professional career in the United States included two stints as the president first of a subsidiary of Transamerica Corporation and later of the Reader’s Digest Inc. I then launched my own company in the field of international education and personnel training with operations and offices in the Americas, Europe, North Africa, the Middle East and the Far East. Having spent the first 34 years of my life in Europe and the rest in the United States I have my feet firmly planted on both sides of the ocean. Having lived in five different American states, having worked for some large American corporations on four of the five continents, and having returned to my native country two to three times a year since I left, I have had the privilege of a front window on life not only in many countries around the world but especially on my adopted country, a country I have fallen in love with like the proverbial religious convert who is holier than thou. When I write about American law and the American justice system I do so from a different perspective than the authors of the books I mentioned above. I grew up and studied overseas, not in America. I am not a lawyer and my legal training in the Netherlands involved old Roman law, old Dutch law, an introduction into modern Dutch law, economics and civil law, a curriculum that couldn’t be more different from anything an American law school teaches its students. All my life I have been a businessman launching and subsequently overseeing operations in many different countries on four different continents. I have not only become familiar with legal systems that are different from the American legal system, in my professional career I have had to work with different legal systems and I have had to negotiate or litigate within the framework of different legal systems. I consequently decided to add my own thoughts to the voices of the various authors who have written about the American legal system. I do not want to limit such thoughts to a recital of the horrors of the system—many other publications have done that job quite adequately. What I like to do is explain how the American legal system evolved and how it has completely veered away from the original English common law system, and why today the system is frequently at odds with established principles of legal fairness and equity as exists in the rest of the developed world. Like the religious convert I mentioned above, I am unabashedly proud of America. What I have to say about my adopted country's legal system, however, does not fit that description. This is not a pretty story, and it is not a story that will earn me new friends in the American legal community. But it is a story that must be told. America is an exceptional country—having traveled extensively and worked on four of the five continents, I can attest to that. However, as is the case with every country, America is not without its shortcomings. This is a story about a serious flaw in American society. This is a story about a legal system that has lost its moral and ethical anchor. This is a story about how a deficient criminal justice system puts innocent people in jail and how, for a good number of its practitioners,
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About the Book
The American legal system is far from perfect. High standards of fairness and equal justice for all are lacking, and conflicts of interest are an integral part of the system’s practitioners. In Law Street, author Wim J.M. Touw discusses the ills of the American legal system and investigates the roots of its dysfunction.
In his analysis Touw argues that American lawyers have lost their moral and ethical moorings; he provides a unique perspective of how American lawyers have manipulated the British common law system for their own financial benefit or to advance their careers. He compares the legal system of the United States with systems in the world’s foremost democracies to illustrate how American jurisprudence has strayed from its mission. Finally, he examines the criminal law system that puts innocent people in jail and explains in detail how the tort system, the contingency fee, and the “loser pays” laws have turned the once noble profession of lawyering into a profitable, unregulated business corrupting the legal process. Touw argues that what is good for Wall Street is good for Law Street and explains why American bar associations do not provide proper oversight.
With thorough explanations and examples, Law Street tells a story about serious flaws in the American legal system and provides a wake-up call for America’s dysfunctional and often corrupt legal system.
About the Author
Wim J. M. Touw was born in the Netherlands. He earned an iruis candidatus degree from the University of Leiden. Touw established his own company in the field of international education and personnel training. He and his wife, Brenda, live in Olympia, Washington, and have four grown children.