Fair Trial: Rights of the Accused in American History.

Fair Trial is an early installment in the series, Bicentennial Essays on the Bill of Rights. Its mission is to foster better teaching about the Bill of Rights in undergraduate classrooms by providing brief, nontechnical surveys that situate the growth of civil rights and civil liberties in social, political, cultural, and historical context.

The strength of Bodenhamer's contribution rests in his bid to do more than summarize three centuries of criminal defendants' rights in America. First, Bodenhamer takes seriously Frankfurter's injunction that "the history of American freedom is . . . the history of procedure."(1) Among the most useful features of this book are careful, …