For baby boomers, senior citizens, gerontologists, and students of aging and the justice system, Howard Eglit's trenchant discussion of the intersection of aging Americans with the U.S. legal system illuminates the consequences of a pervasive bias in contemporary society. America's ballooning older population is well documented. Couple this demographic tidal wave with the legal system, Eglit says, and the inescapable conclusion follows that the matrix of laws, regulations, judicial rulings, and governmental policy issues will affect more and more older people. Were age an innocuous factor in society, this proposition would merit little note. But, he says, "The fact is that age matters. And often negatively so." It matters in the ways that young jurors assess the credibility of older litigants and witnesses. It matters for fashioning the attitudes that older jurors bring into the jury room. It matters for attorneys who deal with older clients and for judges, lawyers, and jurors who must respond to older lawyers. Embedded in American culture, age bias generally works to the detriment of older men and women, and this is dramatically true for individuals caught up in the legal system. Elders on Trial examines the role that age plays in the legal process; more than that, it offers solutions and guides for mitigating the myriad negative aspects of that role. With its concern for human interactions and responses, rather than matters of infrastructure or formal legislative enterprise, the book offers a timely consideration of an urgent challenge faced by American society.

The majority of research on eyewitness memory has traditionally studied children and young adults. By contrast, this volume is designed to provide an overview of empirical research on the cognitive, social, and health related factors that impact the accuracy of eyewitness testimony given by the elderly. The book takes a lifespan developmental perspective that incorporates research on witnesses of all ages, but uses the findings to focus on issues unique to the elderly. This includes research on recognition memory with lineup identifications and recall memory that occurs when an elderly witness is asked to describe an event in court. The Elderly Eyewitness also examines jurors’ reactions to the testimony of an elderly witness, and the legal and social policy issues that emerge when the elderly witness participate in legal proceedings. While reviewing what is known about the elderly witness, the book also provides a direction for future research into this new frontier of scientific inquiry. Its audience spans researchers in cognitive and developmental psychology, and professionals working in the growing area of psychology and law.

What can early Jewish courtroom narratives tell us about the capacity and limits of human justice? By exploring how judges and the act of judging are depicted in these narratives, Trial Stories in Jewish Antiquity: Counternarratives of Justice challenges the prevailing notion, both then and now, of the ideal impartial judge. As a work of intellectual history, the book also contributes to contemporary debates about the role of legal decision-making in shaping a just society. Chaya T. Halberstam shows that instead of modelling a system in which lofty, inaccessible judges follow objective and rational rules, ancient Jewish trial narratives depict a legal practice dependent upon the individual judge's personal relationships, reactive emotions, and impulse to care. Drawing from affect theory and feminist legal thought, Halberstam offers original readings of some of the most famous trials in ancient Jewish writings alongside minor case stories in Josephus and rabbinic literature. She shows both the consistency of a counter-tradition that sees legal practice as contingent upon relationship and emotion, and the specific ways in which that perspective was manifest in changing times and contexts.

The renowned attorney and bestselling author reveals how notable trials throughout our history have helped to shape our nation. Offering insights into the human condition, these trials serve as a historical document, chronicling the struggles and passions of their time.

The inability of American society to tolerate the peculiar institutions embraced by Mormons was one of the major events in the religious history of nineteenth-century America. Zion in the Courts explores one aspect of this collision between the Mormons and the mainstream: the Mormons' efforts to establish their own court system--one appropriate to the distinctive political, social, and economic practices they envisioned as Zion--and the pressures applied by the federal legal system to bring them to heel. This first paperback edition includes two new introductory pieces in which the authors discuss the Mormon emphasis on settling disputes outside the court, a practice that foreshadows current trends toward arbitration and mediation.