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The Myth of the Litigious Society: Why We Don’t Sue. By David Engel. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016.
This is a book to be grateful for. It is a joy to teach, and a wellargued corrective to previous ways of thinking about responses to injury. It is a humane and compassionate text, bringing attention to the embodied and emotional experiences of injury, and the role that these experiences play in channeling the reactions of those in pain, those who have been harmed. The best books help us understand our own substantive and theoretical areas; they help us extend our analysis. Engel's book is indeed one of the best I have read lately. As I read, I find myself wanting to take insights from The Myth of the Litigious Society and travel with them-beyond the study of litigation and settlement and into the study of legal mobilization and social movement activism.
It is a particular strength of this work that to do so is possible; the book opens a set of questions that invite us to think more deeply about individuals' reactions-litigious and not-to trauma. And, Engel's analysis shows us that so much of what we think we know is based on the assumption that people are rational actors-economic self-determining individuals. He is persuasive, and clear: "the decision-tree model [of legal claims making] is deeply flawed. ... [It constructs] an unrealistic image of injury and response that bears little relationship to injuries as they actually occur, or to victims as they actually live, breathe, and cope with the dire circumstances in which they find themselves" (36). So-called rational choice explanations miss-as Engel points out-cultural explanations. They also, and perhaps most importantly, miss the emotional, cognitive, and physical explanations for activism.
In some very evocative passages, and quoting others' powerful...