"For Felman the criminal trial always recapitulates law’s troubled relation to trauma. The structure of trauma, she argues, controls the trial, not the reverse. Trials revisit our inability to reason in the face of trauma, our inability to produce an adequate historical record of its workings. As a result, we turn to literature to remember precisely what cannot be made available in the law. Thus the verdict in the Simpson case is at once about what law’s history remembers and what it forgets. As Felman puts it, the verdict in a landmark trial is a decision about “what to admit into, and what to transmit of, collective memory.” She notes that a legal case can be, and Simpson was, a “locus of embodied history, a ‘site of memory’ in Nora’s terms. That case, like other landmark trials, “triggers inadvertently the movement of a repetition or the dynamics of a “legal recall”. . . . [It] repeats . . . all these repetitions-legal, literary, psychoanalytical, historical-by which the trial tries, and retries to resolve the trauma, and by which the trauma inadvertently repeats itself as an unconscious legal memory under the conscious legal process.”"