Do Not Expect Justice in a Windowless Courtroom
The “Dream Hotel” and “Mothers and Sons” Capture What Happens When Due Process Fails
The Dream Hotel by Laila Lalami (Pantheon, 336 pages)
Mothers and Sons by Adam Haslett (Little, Brown and Company, 336 pages)
The DOJ has admitted violating more than 50 court orders in New Jersey alone. The immigration court backlog sits at roughly 3.7 million cases -- including people who showed up for required check-ins and were taken into custody. In a Minnesota federal courtroom, a volunteer attorney filling in for a depleted office told a judge: “The system sucks, this job sucks, I am trying with every breath I have to get you what I need.”
What’s happening is not normal. But it wasn’t unimaginable. Fiction saw this coming.
Two novels I reviewed last spring came to mind: Adam Haslett’s Mothers and Sons and Laila Lalami’s The Dream Hotel. One is rooted firmly in the (pre-Stephen Miller) recent past, the other imagines a near future shaped by algorithms and surveillance. They were written before the current crisis deepened. They feel like dispatches from inside it.
Both arrive at the same conclusion about how legal systems function when they are overwhelmed, indifferent, or simply designed to move people along. Do not expect justice in a windowless courtroom. That’s where both of these extraordinary novels have their pivotal moments: in repurposed classrooms, converted conference spaces, and other bureaucratic dead zones where due process is an increasingly optional.
Haslett, a Pulitzer Prize finalist, gives us Peter, a weary New York asylum attorney who spends his days fighting the good fight. Mothers and Sons begins with a sentence that reads less like description than diagnosis: “The courtroom is windowless. They all are.”
I spent years in family court in downtown Manhattan and ate off the falafel cart on Chambers Street — Haslett gets every detail right. Lawyers and respondents cluster on benches beneath fluorescent lights while a judge works through the morning docket with the weary efficiency of someone who knows the cases will never stop coming. If those flickering fluorescent lights don’t sap your hope, the procedural indifference will.
The process feels less like justice than logistics. One lawyer refuses to name a country for his client’s removal — why make the government’s job easier? The judge assigns one anyway. A Homeland Security attorney notes that the asylum seeker has a theft conviction. Removal expedited.
Then comes the choreography immigration lawyers know well: calendaring. The judge consults a wrinkled dot-matrix calendar page to find a date when he, two attorneys, and a Russian translator might all be available. The lawyers scroll through their phones like they’re booking a dinner reservation. No one asks the asylum seeker whether Thursday at 9:15 three months from now works. Their lawyer leans over, whispers the date, and the client nods — because explaining work schedules, childcare, or transportation would only slow things down.
It is not cruelty exactly — something colder. Procedural indifference.
Haslett’s real achievement is making you feel the weight of time inside this system. The continuances, the rescheduling, the months that pass while a person’s life hangs suspended. Peter is not a cynical man. He still believes in what he does. But the system he works inside has its own logic, and it does not always bend toward the people it is supposed to serve.
If Haslett shows the system grinding forward in the present, Lalami imagines what happens when the same logic expands beyond the courtroom and into the algorithm. Powerful and precisely imagined, The Dream Hotel unfolds in a near-future dystopia where corporate surveillance and government control converge and dreams become data. Lalami, a Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award finalist, brings the same precision to speculative fiction that she has brought to literary fiction throughout her career.
Sara Husien has been detained by a government agency called the Risk Assessment Administration (RAA) after an algorithm flagged her as a potential threat to her husband — based on data from a sleep-tracking implant she voluntarily chose. The DreamCatcher was marketed as a wellness tool, the sort of frictionless technology people adopt without thinking, the way we agree to terms and conditions or allow apps to monitor our health. (I spent half the book wondering if I should delete my Apple Health data.) One algorithm labels her a risk. That is enough to move her into a system designed to process people quickly and ask questions later.
Sara’s first hearing takes place in a prekindergarten classroom, with twenty-four hours’ notice. Coat hooks still hang at child height along the wall. Her lawyer arrives late and without notes. One violation she is accused of never happened. He scrolls through his phone — searching her file, she hopes, but who knows. He does not challenge it.
“Aren’t you going to say something?” she finally asks. He doesn’t. She isn’t released.
Things spiral. Lalami’s genius is how little she exaggerates. Sara chose the device that produced the data used to detain her. The dystopia she inhabits is only a few bad policy decisions away from our own. As her detention extends, the proceedings grow increasingly informal. A later appearance isn’t even called a hearing held in a former music school room and it’s an “expedited assessment,” officials explain, more efficient. Anyone who has spent time in real court systems will recognize that flawed reasoning. If efficiency is always the reason, justice is rarely the result.
Both novels understand institutions rarely collapse all at once. They stall. They delay. They adapt to dysfunction. Over time the rules that once promised fairness begin to look more like administrative obstacles — things to be routed around rather than honored.
In Haslett’s novel, the system is overwhelmed — and this was before the current administration mobilized against immigrants with the full force of federal enforcement. In Lalami’s, it has adapted so thoroughly to its own dysfunction that no one inside it seems to notice anymore.
Both novels balance procedural realism with literary muscle. Both have a dry, gallows humor. And yet — sometimes the system delivers.
It is delivering right now, in labor-intensive and, hopefully, significant ways. Lawyers in the trenches are winning rulings. One example: A federal judge recently found that Customs and Border Protection likely violated due process in detaining a man without bond; the ACLU of Maine, which filed the original habeas petition, has now filed a related class action.
That is exactly the kind of wins Peter reflects on late in Mothers and Sons, sitting in a park across from a federal courthouse — one of the rare places, he thinks, where something real might still happen.
As Haslett writes: “A legal standard gets tweaked; a rule of timing is modified; the precise quantity or quality of what one subject of asylum seekers must show to remain out of danger is slightly adjusted.”
These books aren’t hopeful, but they aren’t entirely hopeless either. In their dark humor, psychological acuity, and precision of language, they remind us of what’s at stake if systems are left to run on autopilot — and what can still happen when someone fights back.
Fine Print: A version of this review was originally published in www.judicialjunkie.com. https://judicialjunkie.com/f/do-not-expect-justice-in-a-windowless-courtroom
Hi Lauren, Reading is so subjective! I get that it’s a genre that may not appeal to everyone. I loved the premise and the world building. I did read a review that questioned the 3rd person POV. And thought that was an interesting point.
Mary — This is off the point, but by any chance have you reviewed No More Tears, Gardiner Harris’ expose of the legal-problem-plagued Johnson and Johnson? It’s up for a big prize on Thursday (March 25), the NBCC award for nonfiction, and it could become suddenly newsworthy again. If you’ve done reviewed it anywhere, I’d like to to restack or link to it, but I couldn’t find anything. Thanks! Jan