American Bar Association
11997 Silver Gavel Award Winners: Books

1997 WINNERS | NEWSPAPERS | BOOKS | TELEVISION | RADIO | FILMS & VIDEOS

The Life of the Law traces 21 of the most famous and important legal cases and events in our tradition from Anglo-Saxon England to the present. Alfred H. Knight, a former federal prosecutor and Nashville, Tennessee trial lawyer specializing in media and First Amendment law, explores the tensions and experiences behind key legal decisions and the social forces that worked to shape the law in each era. Beginning with the proclamations of Ninth Century English King Alfred the Great and concluding with the two juries ruling on aspects of the Rodney King case, the book uses stories about the law as "focal points" to elucidate important legal concepts and principles. Far from viewing law as a standardized and never-changing system, the author believes that it is a "living organism," a body of rulings and codes shaped by human experience and behavior that constantly changes as time passes. Whether writing about the baronial rivalries that led to the Magna Charta in the 13th century, the journalistic controversies of the 19th century and their relationship to the right of privacy, or the personal and judicial soul-searching of Supreme Court justices in Brown v. Board of Education, The Life of the Law brings to life the personalities and circumstances -- the "story behind the story" of each major event.

Availability: Crown Publishers, Inc., 212/572-2537; $25.00 hardcover, or access the Random House Catalog.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

COMMITTEE COMMENTARY

Written in a witty and accessible manner, The Life of the Law simplifies complex legal issues without distorting them. It chronicles the stories of people -- both lawyers and non-lawyers, the famous and the little-known -- who have contributed to the development of American law. Anyone reading this book will come away with a greater understanding of how the law has shaped, and been shaped by, our society. The Life of the Law represents the best of what the Gavel Awards are designed to recognize -- works that promote public understanding about the law and legal institutions.

E X C E R P T S   F R O M   T H E  L I F E  O F  T H E  L A W

Law is intended to apply to common life and should be comprehensible to ordinary folk, but increasingly it is not.... Gone are the lucid poetry of Holmes, the stirring rhetoric of Brandeis, and the thunderclap prose of Marshall. The meaning of the law is becoming inaccessible, not only to the public but to the bar itself. There are consequences to this, of course. We are more likely to lose the meaning of our freedoms through ignorance and carelessness than through intentional governmental evil.... Knowledge is power, and the law is badly short of people power just now. Besides, legal history as it happened is more entertaining by far than anything "L.A. Law" ever thought of. It is worth the telling--much more than worth the telling--in and of itself.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Concept is what the stories in this book are mostly about. Not philosophy or wisdom, or even right and wrong, but the brand names the law gives to its ideas. If conflict is the root of the law, it is concept that causes it to grow and flourish. There is a magic power in the naming of a legal idea -- the King's Peace, due process of law, liberty of conscience -- that allows it to carry forward into the future as a transformed, better, more powerful idea. A Saxon king gives individual citizens guaranteed protection from physical harm and calls it his "peace." In later generations, his successors proclaim a "peace" in ever wider circles, until the King's Peace encompasses every English citizen -- and a national criminal justice system has been born. The power in a named idea -- a legal concept -- can be greater than the specific judgments of a thousand courts.

Gavel Awards Home | Entry Form & Guidelines | Award Winners | Archives