In Trial and Error, Fred R. Shapiro and Jane Garry bring together thirty-two riveting stories, excerpts from novels, and nonfiction essays about the human dimensions of the law. From Sir Walter Scott's "The Two Drovers" (1827), to Ernest J. Gaines's A Lesson Before Dying (1993), the selections gathered here vividly dramatize the legal process.

We see the law as a vehicle of frustration and inertia in Dickens's Bleak House, as a baffling affront to common sense in Mark Twain's Roughing It, as a forum for humiliation and cruelty in Robert Louis Stevenson's Weir of Hermiston, as a cynical and racist form of expediency in James Alan McPherson's "An Act of Prostitution," and as a battleground for the possession of a child in Sue Miller's The Good Mother. Here we find lawyers, criminal defendants, litigants, clients, judges, police, jurors, and witnesses, all of them depicted with veracity and insight.

Many of the writers in this anthology either practiced or studied law, or were themselves involved in litigation; those who weren't apply powers of observation to a process that affects us all. With a sharply illuminating preface that explores the connections between literature and law, and with a helpful headnote for each selection, Trial and Error puts readers in the jury box as some of the greatest writers in the English language make their cases.