Ten Great American Trials: Lessons in Advocacy

by Faust F. Rossi, Glenn C. Altschuler

Overview

Ten Great American Trials provides chapter-length accounts of some of the most highly publicized – and fascinating – court cases of the twentieth century. Each narrative contains an analysis of prosecutors' and defense attorneys' use of trial advocacy techniques (involving discovery, pre-trial motions, jury selection, direct testimony, cross-examination, the introduction of forensic exhibits, and summations) to craft compelling stories about what happened. The book also assesses the impact of cultural, social, and political values on the proceedings and the outcomes. The cases, several of which have been dubbed “the crime of the century,” were selected because they are dramatic, suspenseful, emotional, intellectually powerful, and have become part of American culture.

Uncertainty about motives, guilt or innocence, it is worth noting, still haunt several of these trials. And every one of the cases has inspired a full length movie, a television series, and/or a documentary.

All ten trials shed light on one or more “hot button” issues: xenophobia, the death penalty, race, anti-communism, free speech rights, homosexuality, and child abuse. The trials covered are:

Sacco and Vanzetti

Leopold and Loeb

The Scottsboro Boys

United States v. Alger Hiss

The Village of Skokie v. The National Socialist Party of America

Dan White (the killer of Harvey Milk and George Moscone, the mayor of San Francisco)

Claus von Bülow

The McMartin Preschool Sexual Abuse Case

O. J. Simpson

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781634255929
Publisher:	American Bar Association
Publication date:	06/01/2017
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	398
Sales rank:	1,122,985
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 8.90(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

Faust F. Rossi, the Samuel S. Leibowitz Professor of Law and Trial Techniques, Emeritus, taught Evidence and Civil Procedure for 47 years at the Cornell Law School.  Regarded as a popular and dynamic teacher by his students and colleagues, Professor Rossi is a national authority on Evidence, Procedure and Trial Advocacy and has written extensively on these subjects.

After graduating from Cornell Law School in 1960, Rossi began his career as a trial attorney in the United States Department of Justice Honors Program and  later became a litigation partner in a New York law firm. In 1966, he joined the Cornell Law faculty where he not only taught but also served for several years as the Associate Academic Dean.  He has authored a text on Expert Witnesses and was a national winner of the Roscoe Pound Jacobson award for Excellence in Teaching Trial Advocacy.

Rossi has given hundreds of Continuing Legal Education lectures to lawyers and judges in the United States and Europe.  He has reached over a hundred thousand law students with his popular bar review lectures and his nationally distributed "Law School Legends" audio and video tapes on Evidence.

Professor Rossi was a recurring visiting professor at the Central European Universityin Budapest where he taught "Introduction to American Civil Procedure"

and was a regular faculty member in the joint Cornell/Paris 1 Summer Institute of International and Comparative Law in Paris for over 15 years.  During his career he has been a visiting professor at Oxford Universityin England; the Universityof Siena, Italy as well as the Law Schools at New York University; Emory University; Universityof San Diego and Georgetown. He also taught for many years at the annual National Institute for Trial Advocacy. 

Glenn C. Altschuler is Dean of the School of Continuing Education and Summer Sessions, the Thomas and Dorothy Litwin Professor of American Studies, and a Weiss Presidential Fellow at Cornell University.  He is the author or coauthor of eleven books and more than one thousand essays and reviews.  Professor Altschuler's op-eds and book reviews appear regularly on The Huffington Post, Psychology Today, and The Conversation US.  The National Book Critics Circle has cited his work as "exemplary."

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments v

Introduction vii

1 Socco and Vanzetti: Martyrs or Murderers? 1

2 Leopold and Loeb: Crime of the Century 43

3 The Scottsboro Trials: A Legal Lynching 77

4 United States v. Alger Hiss: A Cold War Confrontation 107

5 The Sam Sheppard Trial: A Mockory of Justice 149

6 When the Nazis Tried to March in the Village of Skokie 185

7 The Murder Trial of Dan White: The All-American Assassin 217

8 The von Bülow Case 255

9 The McMartin Preschool Child Sex Abuse Case: A National Disgrace 287

10 O. J. Simpson: The Criminal Justice System on Trial 329

Index 385