Did the post-9-11 discussions of enemy combatants and military commissions influence the book?
They certainly did. Modern trials can be understood in many ways, but most people would probably underscore their role as a check on state power. The Bush administrations post-9-11 promise to bring enemies to justice — even Infinite Justice — at the same time as it consigned hundreds of them to the shadowlands of Guantnamo Bay and Bagram made me realize, however, that the avoidance of trials can be as significant as their staging. Although O.J.s prosecution is the last I describe in detail, the jurisprudence of the war on terror pops up throughout my book. Could you explain how torture, which has recently found proponents once again in the U.S., first entered the history of the trial, and how it then left? The peculiar notion that violence begets truth has been around for millennia. Ancient Athenians thought the evidence of slaves inadmissible unless obtained through torture. With the fall of Rome, tortures use declined. Its formal reintroduction comes in the early 13th century, the
