The Trial: A History from Socrates to O.J. Simpson

Paperback. Pub Date :2006-07-03 Pages: 508 Language: English Publisher: HarperCollins UK In an extraordinary history of the criminal trial. Sadakat Kadri shows with wit. legal insight and a travel writers eye for detail. how the irrationality of the past lives on in the legal systems of the present. A bold and brilliant debut from a prize-winning new writer.The Trial spans a vast distance in time. opening in the dread silence of the Egyptian Hall of the Dead and ending with the melodramas and hubbub of the 21st-century trial circus. Reconciliation and vengeance. secrecy and spectacle. superstition and reason all intertwine continually. The book crosses from the marbled courtrooms of Athens through the ordeal pits of Anglo-Saxon England. past the torture chambers of the Inquisition to the judicial theatres of 17th-century Salem. and from 1930s Moscow and post-war Nuremberg to...