Chapter One

We live in a culture obsessed with criminal law. Television programs every night of the week show lawyers and investigators at work, trying cases and unraveling the complexities of a wide variety of crimes. Scores of movies also focus on criminal law, even creating entire realms of crime-solving in an alternative reality that includes superheroes.

Beyond fictionalized entertainment, there are few news stories with the long-term staying power of the prosecution life cycle: a juicy crime, arrest, trial, and sentence. Only a handful of stories have captured the public imagination in the past generation in the way that the arrest and trial of O. J. Simpson did, and it is hard to find a national news outlet that doesn't rely heavily on high-profile criminal cases as a mainstay for programming. From the trial of Martha Stewart through round-the-clock coverage of horrific terrorist acts, the news channels echo the fictional television dramas in their obsession with criminal law, creating news based on "celebrity justice" when no truly significant case is available to talk about. The saturation of our culture with true and untrue stories from the field of criminal law is nearly complete.

But why? Criminal law is but a small part of the field of law. On my faculty of twenty-four professors, just two of us teach criminal law courses. How, then, is criminal law able to so completely capture the imagination of our culture? The reason is simple—compelling stories. We love to hear about the multiple, intertwined stories of the criminal defendant, the prosecutor, the police, and