Law and the Modern Mind first appeared in 1930 when, in the words of Judge Charles E. Clark, it "fell like a bomb on the legal world." In the generations since, its influence has grown-today it is accepted as a classic of general jurisprudence.The work is a bold and persuasive attack on the delusion that the law is a bastion of predictable and logical action. Jerome Frank's controversial thesis is that the decisions made by judge and jury are determined to an enormous extent by powerful, concealed, and highly idiosyncratic psychological prejudices that these decision-makers bring to the courtroom.

CONTENTS: I. The Needless Mystery of Court House Government. II. Fights and Rights. III. Facts Are Guesses. IV. Modern Legal Magic. V. Wizards and Lawyers. VI. The "Fight" Theory versus the "Truth" Theory. VII. The Procedural Reformers. VIII. The Jury System. IX. Defenses of the Jury System--Suggested Reforms. X. Are Judges Human? XI. Psychological Approaches. XII. Criticism of Trial-Court Decisions--The Gestalt. XIII. A Trial as a Communicative Process. XIV. "Legal Science" and "Legal Engineering." XV. The Upper-Court Myth. XVI. Legal Education. XVII. Special Training for Trial Judges. XVIII. The Cult of the Robe. XIX. Precedents and Stability. XX. Codification. XXI. Words and Music: Legislation and Judicial Interpretation. XXII. Constitutions--The Merry-Go-Round. XIII. Legal Reasoning. XXIV. Da Capo. XXV. The Anthropological Approach. XXVI. Natural Law. XXVII. The Psychology of Litigants. XXVIII. The Unblindfolding of Justice. XXIX. Classicism and Romanticism. XXX. Justice and Emotions. XXXI. Questioning Some Legal Axioms. XXXII. Reason and Unreason--Ideals.

Between the Levite at the gate and the judicial systems of our day is a long journey in courthouse government, but its basic structure remains the same - law, judge and process. Of the three, process is the most unstable - procedure and facts. Of the two, facts are the most intractable. While most of the law in books may seem to center about abstract theories, doctrines, princi ples, and rules, the truth is that most of it is designed in some way to escape the painful examination of the facts which bring parties in a particular case to court. Frequently the emphasis is on the rule of law as it is with respect to the negotiable instru ment which forbids inquiry behind its face; sometimes the empha sis is on men as in the case of the wide discretion given a judge or administrator; sometimes on the process, as in pleading to a refined issue, summary judgment, pre-trial conference, or jury trial designed to impose the dirty work of fact finding on laymen. The minds of the men of law never cease to labor at im proving process in the hope that some less painful, more trustworthy and if possible automatic method can be found to lay open or force litigants to disclose what lies inside their quarrel, so that law can be administered with dispatch and de cisiveness in the hope that truth and justice will be served.

In spite of a cascade of criticism launched against the social sciences, they have brought a qualitative improvement in method and theory to the study of human beings and human relations. In the process of developing now commonplace foundations of social research few individuals have exercised a greater role in justifying and enriching social scientific thought and practice than Harold D. Lasswell. Originally published in 1945 as The Analysis of Political Behaviour, this extraordinary volume has been re-titled Legal Education and Public Policy. The selections acknowledge Lasswell's growing anxieties about a world of revolution, violence, and terror, and the frailties of law in addressing such matters. That he did so without recourse to vague and fatuous appeals to world law and world order is an indication of how close to empirical realities he remained. Lasswell's essays fuse the legal and moral in the conduct of public policy. This did not deter him from arguing the case for and ultimate benefits of democratic values as a ground for legal thought. Lasswell singles out the interviewing technique of the psychiatrist, what he calls -the insight interview- in many of these essays. The Freudian world opened up the possibilities of analysis to political scientists who, prior to Lasswell, viewed neuroses in the leaders they studied but without normative points to measure their own biases. Lasswell's essays serve as a landmark in accelerating rapid advance in social science research. It allowed for the evolution of political behavior that has catapulted the field to a major dimension of political science studies in leadership and mass persuasion.

In this famous treatise, a Supreme Court Justice describes the conscious and unconscious processes by which a judge decides a case. He discusses the sources of information to which he appeals for guidance and analyzes the contribution that considerations of precedent, logical consistency, custom, social welfare, and standards of justice and morals have in shaping his decisions.