The Trial: A History from Socrates to O. J. Simpson - Tapa dura

In an extraordinary history of the criminal trial, Sadakat Kadri traces the development of criminal justice from the marbled courtrooms of Athens, past the torture chambers of the Inquisition to the judicial theatres of seventeenth-century Salem, from 1930s Moscow and post-war Nuemberg to the virtual courtooms of modern Hollywood.

For as long as accuser and accused have faced each other in public, criminal trials have been establishing more than who did what to whom, and in this fascinating book Sadakat Kadri, a practicing barrister, surveys over four thousand years of courtroom drama. Encyclopaedic and entertaining, comprehensive and colourful, The Trial addresses many profound themes with verve and wit. Who has the right to judge, and why? What did past civilisations hope to achieve through scapegoats and sacrifices – and to what extent are defendants still made to bear the sins of society at large?

In the book, Kadri journeys from the silence of ancient Egypt’s Hall of the Dead to the clamour of twenty-first century Hollywood to show how emotions and fears have inspired western notions of justice – and the extent to which they still riddle its trials today. He explains, for example, how juries emerged in medieval England as a variation on trials by fire and water, a divinely supervised validation of vengeance, and how delusions precisely identical to those that sent witches to the stake revived as Satanic child abuse accusations during the 1980s.

Although Justice’s sword has always been double-edged – as ready to destroy a community’s enemies as to defend its dreams of due process – the judicial contest also operates to enshrine some of the western world’s most cherished values. The show trials of Stalin's Soviet Union were shams, but Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib act as a reminder that no-trials are equally unjust, and at a time when our familiar constitutional landscape seems to be melting away, an appreciation of the criminal courtroom’s history is more necessary than ever.

In an extraordinary history of the criminal trial, Sadakat Kadri shows with wit, legal insight and a travel writer's eye for detail, how the irrationality of the past lives on in the legal systems of the present. The book is a bold and brilliant debut from a remarkable and prize-winning new writer.

The Trial spans a vast distance, opening in the dread silence of the Egyptian Hall of the Dead and ending with the melodramas and hubbub of the twenty-first century trial circus. Reconciliation and vengeance, secrecy and spectacle, and superstition and reason intertwine continually as it crosses from the marbled courtrooms of Athens through the ordeal pits of Anglo-Saxon England, past the torture chambers of the Inquisition to the judicial theatres of seventeenth-century Salem, 1930s Moscow and post-war Nuremberg to the virtual courtrooms of modern Hollywood.

Kadri shows throughout how the trial has always been concerned to do more than guarantee fairness and hold human beings to account for their deliberate crimes. He recounts how insentient and irrational defendants from caterpillars to corpses were once summonsed to court, given lawyers - before being exiled for their failure to attend or sentenced to die again - and argues that the same urge to punish lives on in today's trials of children and the mentally ill. But although Justice's sword has always been double-edged - as ready to destroy a community's enemies as to defend its dreams of due process - the judicial contest also operates to enshrine some of the western world's most cherished values. The show trials of Stalin's Soviet Union were shams, but Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib are a reminder that no-trials are equally unjust, and at a time when our constitutional landscape seems to be melting away, an appreciation of the criminal courtroom's history is more necessary than ever. As the government of Tony Blair launches an almost annual attempt to truncate trial by jury, and as authorities on both sides of the Atlantic are indefinitely detaining entire categories of people in the name of an endless war on terror, The Trial could hardly be more timely.