Shaun Ossei-Owusu didn’t go to law school to become a lawyer. After a PhD in African American Studies at Berkeley and a fellowship at the American Bar Foundation, he wanted the technical language of law so he could translate what he’d already been studying: how the legal system actually treats people, versus how it says it does.
That instinct became his new book, Law on Trial.
In this conversation, Ossei-Owusu digs into what “thinking like a lawyer” costs, from law school curricula that leave out issues like civil asset forfeiture, to Biglaw and government lawyering, where the pressure to win can crowd out the question of whether winning was the right outcome. We close with practical advice for lawyers trying to stay honest with themselves about the trade-offs they’re making.
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Key Takeaways
* Legal training builds what Ossei-Owusu calls a “tragically necessary skill” — separating law from moral and social context. It’s useful, and it’s also easy to overcorrect.
* Core law school subjects often skip the inequality issues baked into them. Property class rarely covers civil asset forfeiture, even though it’s a bigger part of practice than most casebooks suggest.
* Biglaw economics can quietly work against legitimate discrimination claims, not just frivolous ones, because of who’s paying the bill.
* City and county law departments face a similar tension: they enforce consumer and housing protections while also defending against civil rights claims brought under the same kinds of laws.
* Lawyers can protect their values by setting ethical red lines before financial pressure sets in, not after.