True Tales of Trying Times: Legal Fables for Today

Professor Rains provides a humorous collection of modern-day fables based on actual law cases. These tales are for everyone, not just lawyers, but people too. The fables and their accompanying morals offer us ironic views of the illusive quest for justice in the American legal system.

As noted by Justice Eakin in his Foreword, these stories all have value, if only as examples of what not to do. The Professor's reporting makes them come alive, giving us a collection reflecting the wide range of predicaments created by the human species and other non-rational creatures. We throw our self-made problems into the judicial cauldron, which often just mixes them up and throws them right back at us.

Bob Rains had been practicing law for about a decade when he decided to make the world a better place by 1) - leaving private practice and 2) - creating more lawyers. So now he whiles away his days at a university somewhere in the eastern half of the United States, teaching `the law' to eager young liberal arts majors who might otherwise be flipping burgers. After many years, he is still trying to understand his fellow members of the legal profession and why they do the things they do.

These follies of the legal system, and of those who use and abuse it, are cleverly illustrated by the charming drawings of the creative team of E A Jacobsen. It has been said that the law is only `common sense, modified by the legislature'. Such an aphorism only covers the statutes.

To be comprehensive, some have added `and as misinterpreted by the courts', ensuring the case law is explained as well. The cases here may or may not belie this, but they certainly reflect the predicaments and quandaries the human species creates and throws upon the legal system. They are spawned by every circumstance and motive from the avaricious to the eleemosynary, and they reflect the resourceful endeavours of lawyers and the system to deal with them.