Courts and Criminals

Written in the shadow of America's first great crime wave, these sharp, dispassionate essays pull back the curtain on a justice system still finding itself. Arthur Cheney Train observed the courts of early twentieth-century New York with the eye of both participant and critic, and what he saw animates every page: a system lurching between reform and reaction, where the presumption of innocence was more aspiration than practice, and where women, victims and defendants alike, navigated a legal landscape that viewed them with suspicion or condescension. The essays remain vital because they capture a moment when America's courts were grappling with questions that still haunt us: who deserves liberty, who deserves mercy, and whether the system can ever truly be fair.