Yesterday was the publication date for my new book, Schools for Misrule: Legal Academia and an Overlawyered America, and tomorrow afternoon (Thursday, March 3) at 4 p.m. you can catch me in person talking about it at Cato’s headquarters or watch online at the above link. Commenting will be the Hon. Douglas Ginsburg, distinguished federal judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, and Cato’s Roger Pilon will be moderating. Registration is required for the in-person version and seating not guaranteed.

From Cato’s description:

The ideas that emanate from the nation’s law schools in one generation often wind up shaping law and national policy in the next. But as Cato senior fellow Walter Olson argues in this new book, for more than four decades the nation’s law schools have been a hatchery of bad ideas, from tort and contract theories to class actions, environmental law, racial reparations, the recasting of domestic policy differences as questions of international human rights, and more. Yet the common theme is to confer power and status on the schools’ own graduates and faculty, as law pervades ever wider areas of life. The pipe dream of training up philosopher-monarchs, Olson says, distracts law schools from their genuinely useful function of training competent, ethical, and suitably humble practitioners of the law.

Publisher’s Weekly calls the book “hard-hitting,” “witty,” “cutting-edge commentary,” and “astute.” Commentary magazine runs a lengthy excerpt in its new (March) issue, available here (subscribers or individual purchase). A different excerpt is online at Minding the Campus (free). You can read about some of the early reaction to the book here and here, catch Cato’s audio podcast interview with me, or see whether I’m visiting your city on my spring speaking tour.