Review by Brett Dawson, lawyer and author of "The Evil Deeds of the Ratbag Profession in the Criminal Justice System"
All litigation systems must tolerate some lying by lawyers. Tolerating a modest level of lying is one thing, but Evan Whitton's book Serial Liars explains how and why our adversarial legal system not only tolerates lying, but is more or less based on it.

In an adversarial system lawyers create opposing 'cases' which are presented to neutral and largely inactive judges, who choose between the two ‘cases’. The alleged facts, and frequently the evidence too, are forced to fit the ‘cases’ presented by either side. Inconvenient evidence is simply left out of the presentations to the judge, unless the other side will produce it, in which case efforts are made to sabotage it by the opposition.

The ‘cases’ are really stories dreamed up by lawyers, which will loosely fit the true facts as regards the litigant in the right, but bear little resemblance to the truth as
regards the litigant in the wrong. In criminal defence cases it will often be too difficult to invent any story consistent with both the incontrovertible facts and innocence, so the defendant may invoke what Whitton describes as the "prove it' defence, without proffering any story at all.

As Serial Liars explains, the adversarial system is lawyer-driven. Its opposite is the investigative system which is judge driven and focuses on finding out “what happened?” Only England and its former colonies have the adversarial system. It is not a truth-seeking system, and the book fully explains why that statement is in fact
true. Witnesses may well be sworn in to tell the truth, but there are many ways available to lawyers to prevent them from doing so.

Serial Liars provides ordinary members of the public with the proof they need to demand that the adversarial system be abandoned in favour of inquisitorial method. Make no mistake. This is eventually going to have to come. Of course there will be monstrous opposition from the legal profession, backed up by every dishonest argument imaginable, and then some. Serial Liars confronts all the major lawyer arguments, and disposes of them.

In the NSW Law Society Journal of June 2004 there is an article on the activities of the NZ Law Commission's activities in regard to law reform. The article (with the unlikely title NZ Law Commission in energetic reforming mode) notes: “Something of a newish objection to emerge from the general public was the frequent suggestion that doing away with the adversarial system and resorting entirely to the inquisitorial method would get rid of a whole range of problems at one stroke. There was no support for this from the Commission.”

Of course not. Lawyers will never agree to a diminution of their power and incomes. But it does go to show that the NZ public is beginning to wake up to what is needed. That is what is needed in all the other adversarial countries too. Serial Liars marks another milestone in the grand effort to bring it to pass. No one who reads Serial Liars will be left in any doubt that our adversarial system of justice is rotten to the core.