This book provides the information you need to prepare for trial and represent yourself in court.

Attorney Johnnie Cochran was watching a slow-speed police chase on a news monitor in a local ABC studio. A caravan of Los Angeles police vehicles was following a white Ford Bronco on California Interstate 405. Inside the SUV was ex-football star O.J. Simpson, the LAPD’s primary suspect in the July 12, 1994, murder of his ex-wife, Nicole Brown, and her friend Ronald Goldman. The slow-speed chase ended hours later when Simpson surrendered to the police at his Brentwood home. Relieved by the peaceful arrest, Cochran then appeared on Ted Koppel’s Nightline television show. He cautioned viewers that, in accordance with American tradition, Simpson should be presumed innocent of the killings.

The civil jury must rank among the most controversial of America’s political and legal institutions. To paraphrase Kalvan and Zeisel’s ground-breaking work, the jury is a group of people, chosen at random, who are then entrusted with official decision-making powers, yet who make their decisions in secret and with little or no explanation. It is therefore not surprising that the jury has been the subject of both extravagant praise and harsh criticism (Kalven and Zeisel, 1966, pg. 66). Indeed, contemporary critics of the civil justice system decry a “litigation explosion” of “frivolous lawsuits” decided by incompetent, irrational and gullible jurors.1 Despite this heated rhetoric surrounding the jury, relatively little is known about how civil juries reach their verdicts.

The recent lawsuits involving cigarettes, guns, and other products have created a new phenomenon. Such litigation results in negotiated regulatory policies to settle the suit or serves as a financial lever to promote support for governmental policies. The allocation of responsibilities for policy becomes blurred, as litigation becomes the mechanism forcing regulatory changes. The policies that result from litigation almost invariably involve less public input and accountability than government regulation.

Forensic ergonomics and human factors is the application of ergonomics theory, principles, and data to determine causes of system failures, often involving personal injury, considered in the context of litigation. The International Ergonomics Association defines ergonomics (or human factors) as the scientific discipline concerned with the understanding of interactions among humans and other elements of a system, and the profession that applies theory, principles, data, and methods to design in order to optimize human well-being and overall system performance.

This book is the culmination of a personal quest that began sixteen years ago when I left law practice and began to cast about for other ways to make a living through my self-bred compulsion to live and think like a lawyer. It has been a meandering journey.

From local trial courts to the United States Supreme Court, judges' decisions affect the fates of individual litigants and the fate of the nation as a whole. Scholars have long discussed and debated explanations of judicial behavior. This book examines the major issues in the debates over how best to understand judicial behavior and assesses what we actually know about how judges decide cases. It concludes that we are far from understanding why judges choose the positions they take in court. Lawrence Baum considers three issues in examining judicial behavior. First, the author considers the balance between the judges' interest in the outcome of particular cases and their interest in other goals such as personal popularity and lighter workloads. Second, Baum considers the relative importance of good law and good policy as bases for judges' choices. Finally Baum looks at the extent to which judges act strategically, choosing their own positions after taking into account the positions that their fellow judges and other policy makers might adopt. Baum argues that the evidence on each of these issues is inconclusive and that there remains considerable room for debate about the sources of judges' decisions. Baum concludes that this lack of resolution is not the result of weaknesses in the scholarship but from the difficulty in explaining human behavior. He makes a plea for diversity in research. This book will be of interest to political scientists and scholars in law and courts as well as attorneys who are interested in understanding judges as decision makers and who want to understand what we can learn from scholarly research about judicial behavior. Lawrence Baum is Professor of Political Science, Ohio State University.

The Sword and the Scales is the first in-depth and comprehensive study of attitudes and behaviors of the United States toward major international courts and tribunals, including the International Courts of Justice, WTO, and NAFTA dispute settlement systems; the Inter-American Court of Human Rights; and all international criminal courts. Thirteen essays by American legal scholars map and analyze current and past patterns of promotion or opposition, use or neglect, of international judicial bodies by various branches of the United States government, suggesting a complex and deeply ambivalent relationship. The United States has been, and continues to be, not only a promoter of the various international courts and tribunals but also an active participant of the judicial system. It appears before some of the international judicial bodies frequently and supports more, both politically and financially. At the same time, it is less engaged than it could be, particularly given its strong rule of law foundations and its historical tradition of commitment to international law and its institutions.

When conservatives took control of the federal judiciary in the 1980s, it was widely assumed that they would reverse the landmark rights-protecting precedents set by the Warren Court and replace them with a broad commitment to judicial restraint. Instead, the Supreme Court under Chief Justice William Rehnquist has reaffirmed most of those liberal decisions while creating its own brand of conservative judicial activism. Ranging from 1937 to the present, The Most Activist Supreme Court in Historytraces the legal and political forces that have shaped the modern Court. Thomas M. Keck argues that the tensions within modern conservatism have produced a court that exercises its own power quite actively, on behalf of both liberal and conservative ends. Despite the long-standing conservative commitment to restraint, the justices of the Rehnquist Court have stepped in to settle divisive political conflicts over abortion, affirmative action, gay rights, presidential elections, and much more. Keck focuses in particular on the role of Justices O'Connor and Kennedy, whose deciding votes have shaped this uncharacteristically activist Court.

In Proving the Unprovable, Professor Slobogin has done the undoable; he has produced a probing critique of the legal rules for admitting expert mental health testimony that had me turning the pages as if it were a suspense novel. After trenchantly analyzing current stands for admissibility, he suggests innovative approaches to protect the reasonable contributions that mental health experts can make. I doubt that any expert, no matter how experienced, who reads this book will view his or her task on the witness stand in quite the same way again.

The Cornell Law Review is the flagship legal journal of Cornell Law School. Originally published in 1915 as the Cornell Law Quarterly, the journal features scholarship in all fields of law. Notably, past issues of the Cornell Law Review have included articles by Supreme Court justices Robert H. Jackson, John Marshall Harlan II, William O. Douglas, Felix Frankfurter, and Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

In this study, an assessment model is developed to guide courts in deciding equal treatment cases. Such a model appears to be indispensable, since relevant equality provisions often do not offer much guidance as to the assessment of unequal treatment. This lack of guidance may lead to diverging approaches and outcomes, which is undesirable from the perspective of equality and legal certainty. The use of the assessment model developed in this study will improve judicial reasoning and enhance the legitimacy of equal treatment case law. The general assessment model developed in this study is based on theoretical research after the standards that should be used in assessing cases against the principle of equal treatment, supplemented by an elaborate comparative analysis of the equal treatment case law in various legal systems. The result of this approach is the design of an assessment model that is both theoretically sound and workable in practice.

Im Mittelpunkt der Untersuchung stehen militärgerichtliche Strafverfahren gegen Zivilpersonen. Die Frage, inwiefern solche Verfahren mit dem Recht auf ein faires Verfahren vereinbar sind, beschäftigt internationale Spruchkörper und Gremien seit längerem.PrüfungsmaÃstab sind drei Konventionen: die EMRK, die AMRK und der Internationale Pakt über bürgerliche und politische Rechte. Die Arbeit systematisiert zunächst die vorhandene Spruchpraxis. Sie geht sodann der Frage nach, ob es ein Recht auf ein zuständiges Gericht gibt bzw. wie sich ein solches Recht konstruieren lässt. Ausführungen zu besonderen Problemen im Kontext von Ausnahmezuständen und eine Betrachtung der U.S.-amerikanischen Militärkommissionen im Nachtrag runden die Analyse ab.

Vol. 1 : A-K. - 981 p.

From examining the role of the lawyer and the lawyer-client relationship, to evaluating changes in legislation and industry-wide and addressing the need for innovation, this book pulls readers through all facets of the successful practice of law.

Books in the Contemporary World Issues series address vital issues in today’s society such as genetic engineering, pollution, and biodiversity. Written by professional writers, scholars, and nonacademic experts, these books are authoritative, clearly written, up-to-date, and objective. They provide a good starting point for research by high school and college students, scholars, and general readers as well as by legislators, businesspeople, activists, and others.