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Enterprising trial lawyers are using photos, videos, animations, and sound files to recreate litigants’ private sensory experiences – their impaired vision or hearing due to accidents or malpractice, or their misperceptions of events under stressful situations. These demonstrative exhibits, it is claimed, let jurors know, and not merely know about, what it’s like to experience what the litigant does. But how is it possible to share another person’s sensations? And why should courts ever allow this sort of evidence? Simulations of subjectivity are made possible by a confluence of digital technology, clinical science, creative lawyering, the law of evidence, and popular culture. This book explores the epistemological, psychological, and sometimes scientific underpinnings of different types of evidentiary simulations. Through detailed case studies, it examines how these exhibits are constructed, presented, and understood in court, elucidating their visual rhetoric as well as their probative value. And it critically evaluates whether judges and lawyers are treating these simulations in ways that illuminate or, on the contrary, obscure the very different sorts of claims they make to provide reliable knowledge of litigants’ minds.

Islam's tense relationship with modernity is one of the most crucial issues of our time. Within Islamic legal systems, with their traditional preference for eyewitness testimony, this struggle has played a significant role in attitudes toward expert witnesses. Utilizing a uniquely comparative approach, this book examines the evolution of the role of such witnesses in a number of Arab countries from the premodern period to the present. It begins with a history of expert testimony in medieval Islamic culture, analyzing the different roles played by male experts, especially physicians and architects, and females, particularly midwives. From there, it focuses on the case of Egypt, tracing the country's reform of its traditional legal system along European lines beginning in the late nineteenth century. Returning to a broader perspective, the book draws on a variety of legal and historical sources to place the phenomenon of expert testimony in cultural context. A truly comprehensive resource, this book will be sought out by a broad spectrum of scholars working in history, religion, gender studies, and law.

Judges, as Alexander Hamilton famously noted, lack the purse or the sword, and so must rely on their reputation to secure compliance with their decisions. This book uses the economics of information to understand the organization of the judiciary. While there is no shortage of other accounts in comparative law trying to explain judicial organization, most of these draw very heavily on history, tradition, and culture, emphasizing distinctions like that between the common law and civil law. Our account, however, starts with the agency model that has become central to modern legal and economic analysis. We show that this very simple model can explain a good deal of the variation that we observe around the world. A key part of our analysis is to recognize that reputation is a quality of both the judiciary as a whole, but also of individual judges, and that different systems of organization encourage investment in different parts of reputation. While we do not suggest that one model is universaly superior to another, we do identify the inevitable tradeoffs involved. Our approach has the advantage of being able to account for change over time in response to broader changes in society, and so we speculate how judicial reputation has been affected by globalization.

Lawsuits are rare events in most people's lives. High-stakes cases are even less commonplace. Why is it, then, that scholarship about the Japanese legal system has focused almost exclusively on epic court battles, large-scale social issues, and corporate governance? This book fills a void in our understanding of the relationship between law and social life in Japan by shifting the focus to cases more representative of everyday Japanese life. Compiling case studies based on seven fascinating themes—karaoke-based noise complaints, sumo wrestling, love hotels, post-Kobe earthquake condominium reconstruction, lost-and-found outcomes, working hours, and debt-induced suicide—it offers a portrait of the way law intermingles with social norms, historically ingrained ideas, and cultural mores in Japan. Each example is informed by extensive fieldwork. The author interviews all of the participants—from judges and lawyers to defendants, plaintiffs, and their families—to uncover an everyday Japan where law matters, albeit in very surprising ways.

The role of the U.S. Supreme Court in the aftermath of the 2000 presidential election raised questions in the minds of many Americans about the relationships between judges and political influence; the following years saw equally heated debates over the appropriate role of political ideology in selecting federal judges. Legal scholars have always debated these questions—asking, in effect, how much judicial systems operate on merit and principle and how much they are shaped by politics. The Japanese Constitution, like many others, requires that all judges be “independent in the exercise of their conscience and bound only by this Constitution and its laws.” Consistent with this requirement, Japanese courts have long enjoyed a reputation for vigilant independence—an idea challenged only occasionally, and most often anecdotally. But this book uses the latest statistical techniques to examine whether that reputation always holds up to scrutiny—whether, and to what extent, the careers of lower court judges can be manipulated to political advantage. On the basis of careful econometric analysis of career data for hundreds of judges, the book finds that Japanese politics do influence judicial careers, discreetly and indirectly: judges who decide politically charged cases in ways favored by the ruling party enjoy better careers after their decisions than might otherwise be expected, while dissenting judges are more likely to find their careers hampered by assignments to less desirable positions.

A leader of a global superpower is betrayed by his mistress, who makes public the sordid details of their secret affair. His wife stands by as he denies the charges. Debates over definitions of moral leadership ensue. Sound familiar? If you guessed Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky, try again. This incident involved former Japanese prime minister Sōsuke Uno and a geisha. This book organizes the seemingly random worlds of Japanese and American scandal—from corporate fraud to baseball cheaters, political corruption to celebrity sexcapades—to explore well-ingrained similarities and contrasts in law and society. In Japan and the United States, legal and organizational rules tell us what kind of behavior is considered scandalous. When Japanese and American scandal stories differ, those rules—rules that define what is public and what is private, rules that protect injuries to dignity and honor, and rules about sex, to name a few—often help explain the differences. In the cases of Clinton and Uno, the rules help explain why the media did not cover Uno's affair, why Uno's wife apologized on her husband's behalf, and why Uno—but not Clinton—resigned.