Trial Magazine

Harvesting Witnesses’ Stories

By Katherine James
AAJ Press
www.justice.org/HarvestingWitnessesStories
284 pp.; $114.99

Renowned trial consultant Katherine James uses her theater background and considerable witness prep skills to help lawyers tell their clients’ stories effectively. The first part, “Tales,” includes stories from real prep sessions and addresses the various challenges lawyers may encounter while working with witnesses. The tales give insight on how to handle every type of witness—the terrified and traumatized, the poor communicators, and many more. In the second part—“Tools and Techniques”—James gives lawyers advice on how to work with witnesses to convey to jurors the extent of a client’s loss and maximize noneconomic damages through stories that convey the human damages at the heart of the case.

Shortlisted: Women in the Shadows of the Supreme Court

By Renee Knake Jefferson and Hannah Brenner Johnson
NYU Press
https://nyupress.org
304 pp.; $30

Before Sandra Day O’Connor became the first woman appointed to the U.S. Supreme Court in 1981, nine other women were “shortlisted”—considered in a mix of qualified candidates but not selected. Authors Johnson—a vice dean and associate professor of law at California Western School of Law—and Jefferson—a professor of law at the University of Houston Law Center—tell the stories of these accomplished women and how the practice of shortlisting exposes enduring gender discrimination and “creates the appearance of valuing diversity but preserves the status quo.” The authors also aim to offer “inspiration for women to chart a path from shortlisted to selected in any career.”

Evaluating Police Uses of Force

By Seth W. Stoughton, Jeffrey J. Noble, and Geoffrey P. Alpert
NYU Press
https://nyupress.org
352 pp.; $60

This book focuses on the use of physical force by police officers is an issue of great importance that affects the public’s attitudes about police and government. The authors—professors Stoughton and Alpert and police consultant Noble—estimate such force is used 600,000 times annually in the United States. They discuss how media coverage can lead to misperceptions about use of force incidents. Although the book notes that race and class inequities in policing and use of force are important topics, it focuses on how individual police uses of force are evaluated. The authors discuss constitutional, state, and administrative standards; community expectations; police tactics; and how police officers use force.

Sway: Unravelling Unconscious Bias

By Pragya Agarwal
Bloomsbury Sigma
bloomsbury.com
448 pp.; $28

Behavioral scientist Agarwal strives to understand implicit or unconscious bias—which she says often contrasts with our beliefs—and how it takes hold based on people’s upbringing and societal influences. The author notes that unconscious bias applies to more than just race and gender; it can extend to views on disabilities, sexuality, profession, and other factors, which “influence the assessments we make of people and form the basis of our relationship with others and the world at large.” Agarwal uses scientific research and personal stories to illustrate the impact that implicit bias can have on our lives and how technology can reinforce such bias.

Baseless: My Search for Secrets in the Ruins of the Freedom of Information Act

By Nicholson Baker
Penguin Press
penguin.com/publishers/penguinpress
464 pp.; $30

When Nicholson Baker set out to write a book about Cold War history, he sought to discover whether the United States had used biological weapons during the early 1950s. Finding no clear answer, he filed a request under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). The resulting odyssey led him to write this book, detailing his efforts to “squeeze germs of truth from the sanitized documentary record of the U.S. government.” Writing in the style of a diary, Baker describes the confounding delays and frustrating redactions that eviscerated all meaning from the documents he was able to obtain and exposes what he terms “the uselessness and toothlessness of FOIA.”