The United States has the greatest legal system the world has ever known!?

According to Attorney General Eric Holder it has. In the pompous introduction of his speech at the Annual Meeting of the American Bar Association’s House of Delegates today we are told that the United States has the greatest legal system the world has ever known. However, the deeper you delve into his remarks, the more it seems that the opposite might be the case.

The greatest legal system the world has ever known “needs a fundamentally new approach“, Holder said. While I [Holder] have the utmost faith in – and dedication to – America’s legal system, we must face the reality that, as it stands, our system is in too many respects broken. The course we are on is far from sustainable.

The U.S. legal system obviously has to change a lot if it ever wants to become the greatest legal system the world has ever known.

Holder´s remarks on how to handle drug-related cases are of special interest.