Law and the Modern Mind

By Jerome Frank

FROM THE COVER: “Law And The Modern Mind appeared in 1930 and, in the words of Judge Charles E. Clark, it "fell like a bomb on the legal world." In the generation since, its influence has grown rather than diminished, until today it isaccepted as aclassic of general jurisprudence. The work is a bold and persuasive attack on the delusion that The Law is a bastion of predic- table and logical action. Judge Frank's controversial thesis is that the decisions made by judge and jury are determined to an enormous extent by powerful, concealed, and highly idiosyncratic psychological prejudices that these arbiters bring to the courtroom. He points out that all legal verdicts result from the application of known legal rules to the facts of the suit-a procedure that sounds utterly methodical and uncapricious. But, Judge Frank argues, because profound, immeasurable biases will strongly influence the judge and jury's reaction to a witness, lawyer, or litigant, we can never know what they will believe "the facts of the suit" to be.”

NY. Doubleday. 1930, 1963. 419p. CONTAINS MARK-UP