On the American Trial

Robert P. Burns, Northwestern University School of Law, has published The Death of the American Trial (University of Chicago Press, 2009). Here's an abstract from SSRN.

This short essay is a summary of my assessment of the meaning of the "vanishing trial" phenomenon. It addresses the obvious question: "So what?" It first briefly reviews the evidence of the trial's decline. It then sets out the steps necessary to understand the political and social significance of our vastly reducing the trial's importance among our modes of social ordering. The essay serves as the Introduction to a book, The Death of the American Trial, soon to be published by the University of Chicago Press.