"The essays in “History, Memory and the Law” address this subject, each in its own distinctive voice. They present grounded examinations of particular problems, places, and practices rather than grand theories. In so doing they address the ways in which memory works in and through law, the sites of remembrance that law provides, the battles against forgetting that are fought in and around those sites. Here we attend to what Lucie White has labeled both the “epic” style of remembering the past, the “grand, monumental, Manichean style . . . that splits the world, morally, along temporal lines,” as well as to what she calls the “tragic” style of remembering. This style, White claims, “teases out the multiple, tangled, always partial threads that comprise the space where ‘civility’ has been enacted and resisted and reshaped.” This kind of remembering spurns “grand gestures.” It remembers in “grounded, gradual ways.” It makes the accomplishments of the past more hard fought, more tentative, more elusive, and more deeply intertwined with the moral horrors to which it insists we attend. The essays in this book also inquire about the way history is mobilized in legal decision making, the rhetorical techniques for marshaling and for overcoming precedent, and the different histories that are written in and through the legal process. Among the questions that they address are, How are the histories and memories created by law different by virtue of the site of their creation? Through what representational practices are the seeming continuities between past and present that are necessary to legitimize legal decisions constructed and preserved? Whose histories and memories “count” in law? What does history do to and for, law, and what does law do to history? Under what conditions do legal institutions, such as courts or prisons, becomes sites of memory?"