In this remarkable collaboration, one of the nation's leading civil rights lawyers joins forces with one of the world's foremost cultural psychologists to put American constitutional law into an American cultural context. By close readings of key Supreme Court opinions, they show how storytelling tactics and deeply rooted mythic structures shape the Court's decisions about race, family law, and the death penalty.

Minding the Law explores crucial psychological processes involved in the work of lawyers and judges: deciding whether particular cases fit within a legal rule...

Until now, only the twelve jurors who sat in judgment were able to appreciate these virtuoso performances, where weeks of testimony were boiled down and presented with flair, wit, and high drama. For five years the authors researched every archive, and readers can now lose themselves in the summations of America's finest litigators.

Clarence Darrow saves Leopold...

Lubet's Nothing But The Truth presents a novel and engaging analysis of the role of storytelling in trial advocacy. The best lawyers are storytellers, he explains, who take the raw and disjointed observations of witnesses and transform them into coherent and persuasive narratives.

Critics of the adversary system, of course, have little patience for storytelling, regarding trial lawyers as flimflam artists who use sly means and cunning rhetoric to befuddle witnesses and bamboozle juries. Why not simply allow the witnesses to speak their minds, without the distorting influence of...

America has a long history of sensationalized trials and infamous lawyers and judges, but what is the truth about how our system of jurisprudence really works? "Courts and Trials: A Reference Handbook" makes the subject accessible by presenting an overview of the organization of courts and procedures used in criminal and civil cases, with special emphasis on contemporary developments.

The book analyzes specific issues: methods of selecting judges, the capacity of citizen-jurors to make appropriate decisions, cameras in the courtroom, "three strikes" laws, and the prosecution of...