Advocacy in the Modern Age

Historically, public trials have been important sources of information and crucibles or debate for some of the most important public issues that have arisen in our history: from fugitive slaves and slavery itself to labor unrest and sweatshop conditions to political radicalism in the period after the First World War and again in the sixties. We would be the much poorer in our understanding of these events without what we have learned from the public trials that illuminated them. Those trials were an important part of our national character.