This book offers a groundbreaking account of the surprising interaction between trauma and justice. Moving from texts by Arendt, Benjamin, Freud, Zola, and Tolstoy to the Dreyfus and Nuremberg trials, as well as the trials of O. J. Simpson and Adolf Eichmann, Shoshana Felman argues that the adjudication of collective traumas in the twentieth century transformed both culture and law. This transformation took place through legal cases that put history itself on trial, and that provided a stage for the expression of the persecuted--the historically "expressionless."

Richard Posner discusses the structure and behavior of the legal profession; constitutional theory; interdisciplinary approaches to law; the nature of legal reasoning; and legal pragmatism. Although written by a sitting judge, the book does not avoid controversy, and contains frank appraisals of feminist and critical race theories, the behavior of the German and British judiciaries in wartime, and the excesses of social constructionist theories of sexual behavior.

Throughout, the book is unified by Posner's distinctive stance, which is pragmatist in philosophy, economic in methodology, and liberal (in the sense of John Stuart Mill's liberalism) in politics. Brilliantly written, eschewing jargon and technicalities, it makes a major contribution to the debate about the role of law in our society.