Trial Lawyer: A Life Representing People Against Power
(By Richard Zitrin)
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| Author | Richard Zitrin |
Richard Zitrin became an internationally known legal ethics professor. But from this very first case as a young law student, he embarked on a parallel forty-year career as a trial lawyer. Zitrin’s work as a trial lawyer placed him on the front lines of fighting systemic racism, pervasive elitism, and injustice against individuals in the legal system. Throughout his one-of-a-kind career, he has worked on dozens of cases that underscore the inherent biases of the legal system – towards people of color, the poor, the less educated, and those who just don’t appear to fit the mold of whatever society considers “normal.”
Part memoir, part social critique, Trial Lawyer: A Life Representing People Against Power shares details of the most compelling cases Zitrin has encountered, exposes the ethical dilemmas he faced, and explores the systemic racism and elitism he witnessed. His personal stories bring the reader inside the courtroom to experience a unique cast of characters, strange-but-true facts, brilliant trial tricks and tactics—and not-so-brilliant ones that failed miserably. Each had its own lessons: about social justice, fairness, strategy, ethics, morality, and more. Showcasing the profound, the consequential, the shocking, the bizarre, even the humorous, Trial Lawyer brings to life what it means to represent people against power.
Pervasive bias, of course, has many forms, and Zitrin has seen it used against all kinds of people: a young Vietnamese man whose family faced racial targeting and hostility and who was then accused of a serious crime just for talking about protecting his family; an indigenous woman who became an addicted street hooker because her life experience left her so few choices; a teenager from a Middle Eastern background who was racially profiled by a cop in an upscale white, suburban town; a poor Latina whose truthfulness was disputed because of her language skills and status – and because her community’s July 4th celebration occurred at a local bar instead of a country club. These stories pull back the curtains of our justice system to show the truth of what really happens inside our courtrooms. Trial Lawyer is a captivating and vivid picture of how one lawyer has overcome the powers aligned against his clients by determination, innovation, and simple human understanding.”
