Trial Lawyer
A Life Representing People Against Power
Internationally known legal ethics professor Richard 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. In Trial Lawyer, he shares details of the most compelling cases he’s encountered and exposes the dilemmas he faced throughout his one-of-a-kind career. The profound, the consequential, the shocking, the bizarre, and even the humorous, Trial Lawyer brings to life what it means to represent people against power.
From his first case as a young law student on the famous and highly politicized San Quentin Six case and throughout his forty-year career, Zitrin 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.” 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.
