Justice & Law Quote by Stanley Crouch

Stanley Crouch is allergic to the comforting myth that the market polices itself. The bite in his line is how little faith he places in “lobbying” as anything but an elaborate form of insulation: money buys access, narratives, and delay. Yet he insists that big business still gets “put in line” by forces that can’t be fully purchased or spun - the messy, public machinery of exposure and consequence.

The phrasing is tactical. “Investigative reporting” comes first because it’s the spark: journalists convert private harm into public fact, turning corporate risk calculations into reputational emergencies. “Public scandals” follow as the cultural multiplier, when a story escapes the ledger and becomes a social event that customers, regulators, and politicians can’t ignore without looking complicit. The final hammer is “multi-million-dollar judgments,” the point where outrage stops being symbolic and becomes a price tag. Crouch isn’t romantic about justice; he’s describing leverage.

The subtext is a warning about power in American life: formal oversight often lags, and lobbying is designed to keep it that way. So accountability arrives sideways - through lawsuits, headlines, and the court of public opinion. His focus on “products...dangerous to their buyers” narrows the moral claim to something visceral and hard to relativize: people were sold harm. It’s a critic’s sentence, less interested in policy detail than in the cultural choreography of how wrongdoing finally becomes undeniable.