Popular trials are a pervasive part of public life with important social and political functions.
Popular trials are a distinctive form of public discourse.
They are the place where journalism and law meet. Whatever else they are, popular trials are public performances subject to intense scrutiny and extensive conversation. This course will examine these performances, examine controversies surrounding their reporting and representation, consider the issues they raise, and study the trials themselves. In a broad sense, this course is about the meanings of law in American society and about the definitions of American society revealed in legal disputes. It is about the ways in which the most public trials offer competing visions of community, struggle to structure understandings, and both encourage and challenge definitions of self and social situations.