If Jay Gatsby had survived the bullet, would he have had a case?
Imagine the lawsuit: negligent security, wrongful death attempt, maybe even a defamation angle against Tom Buchanan. But of course, Gatsby doesn’t survive. That’s the point. In The Great Gatsby, justice doesn’t live in West Egg. It sips martinis across the bay in an old-money mansion and never faces even a semblance of consequence. The novel ends, as so many legal cases do, with a shrug and a funeral no one attends.
Scott Fitzgerald didn’t write a courtroom drama, but he did write a legal reality—one that still shapes American life. His 1925 masterpiece is a glittering, gin-soaked indictment of how wealth, class, and social polish warp the distribution of power. A century later, the American legal system is still struggling to shed its Daisy Buchanan problem: the law protects those who already belong.
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Gatsby, a self-made millionaire, is a quintessential believer in the American Dream. He builds an empire, reinvents his identity, and throws parties so luminous they seem untouchable by consequence. But the minute things go sideways—when Myrtle Wilson is killed, when blame must be assigned—it’s Gatsby who pays, not the people with pedigree.
Tom and Daisy Buchanan lie, flee, and retreat into the cocoon of inherited status. Their immunity is social, but it’s also legal. The law doesn’t come for them because, implicitly, it wasn’t designed to.
This dynamic remains intact in our contemporary legal system. You can see it in the cost of civil litigation. Filing a lawsuit in America is easy if you’re wealthy. If you’re not, good luck. You’ll need a lawyer willing to take contingency. You’ll need stamina for years of procedural trench warfare. You’ll need to survive the gauntlet of delay tactics, discovery abuse, and judge-made doctrines like arbitration clauses and standing rules that quietly push poor plaintiffs off the map.
Jay Gatsby wouldn’t get far. Not because he isn’t rich—but because he isn’t the right kind of rich. He’s nouveau riche. Outsider rich. Contingent rich. And American law, then as now, tends to favor legacy over hustle.
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Look no further than today’s hot-button issue: non-compete clauses. Once reserved for high-level executives, they’ve metastasized into fast food jobs, dog groomers, and warehouse workers. These are contracts that say: you may work, but not freely. You may leave, but not without penalty. You may dream, but not too big.
Sound familiar?
It’s Gatsby again, staring across the bay at the green light—forever reaching, never arriving. The promise of mobility, blocked by the invisible hand of entrenched power.
Non-competes are often legally enforceable only because people lack the money to fight them. Companies know this. The clauses don’t need to win in court—they just need to intimidate. It’s the same strategy Tom Buchanan uses: exert dominance, trust the system won’t push back, and if it does, retreat into privilege.
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Even in areas where plaintiffs theoretically have power—say, in mass tort litigation—Gatsby’s ghost lingers. Think of the thousands injured by talc powder, toxic water, or defective drugs. These cases generate headlines, settlements, even some measure of justice. But the machinery behind them is slow, expensive, and often shaped by the very corporations being sued.
Settlement structures prioritize speed over individual recovery. Bankruptcy maneuvers (think Purdue Pharma) are used to limit liability. Plaintiffs become data points in litigation portfolios—Gatsbys in their own right, victims with stories too complex to fit on a docket sheet.
Fitzgerald understood this long before multidistrict litigation was a gleam in a judge’s eye. In his world, as in ours, tragedy is personalized and justice is procedural.
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And then there’s Daisy. Elusive, enchanting, and always protected. In Gatsby’s universe, she represents both the object of desire and the system that withholds it. She is at once the love interest and the embodiment of structural unfairness.
Daisy runs someone over and gets away with it. Today, her analogues donate to PACs, endow chairs at law schools, and write op-eds about civility in politics. They say things like “the system works,” even when it plainly doesn’t.
In modern courtrooms, Daisy appears as the well-lawyered defendant. She’s the executive who claims ignorance, the institution that issues a non-apology, the politician who blames the algorithm. She walks out unscathed because she was never really on trial. Just like in West Egg.
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If Fitzgerald were alive today, he might set The Great Gatsby in Silicon Valley or Palm Beach. Gatsby would be a startup founder with a SPAC. Tom would be born on third base with a litigation war chest. Daisy would be curated and corporate, not soft and Southern. But the legal system? That wouldn’t need much rewriting.
We still live in a country where lawsuits are luxury goods. Where justice is gated. Where the civil courts say “everyone is equal before the law,” but the docket tells a different story.
Gatsby believed in the green light. Lawyers—especially those in the plaintiff’s bar—believe in the courthouse. But both dreams rely on access, and access still too often depends on whether you’re from East Egg or West.
Until we build a system where class and capital don’t dictate outcomes, Gatsby will keep dying. And the Buchanans will keep moving on.
