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This book compares the courtroom discourse of the adversarial system to the courtroom discourse of the inquisitorial system by comparing a trial occurring in the United States of America, which has an adversarial system, to a trial occurring in Poland, which has an inquisitorial system. Though the trials are quite different from each other – a murder case involving the famous American football player O. J. Simpson and a theft case involving a teenage boy – the manner in which these cases are handled illustrates important differences between the two systems.
As such, it falls within the broader literature on comparative legal systems. This literature is already quite robust. Indeed, a quick search of LexisNexis Academic using the key words "adversarial legal system" or "adversarial legal culture" yeilds 997 hits, and a search using the key words "inquisitorial legal system" results in 999 hits. The literature has been increasingly critical of the adversarial system since at least the 1980s, despite its entrenchment in the American legal system.
The Present in the Past is a compilation of previously-published work by noted historian and political scientist, Robert Traba. It includes material from two earlier books published in Polish, Historia przestrzeń dialogu (2006) and Przeszłość w teraźniejszości. Polskie spory o historię na początku XXI wieku (2009), as well as two articles published in 2013. Although its contents are not new to Polish-speaking readers, the book introduces English-speaking audiences to the seminal works of a key contributor to Poland's "memory boom."
Evoking Polish Memory explores the contemporary memoryscape of a mid-sized Polish city through the eyes of victims of repression and former security officers involved in political violence from 1944-1989. A theoretically sophisticated and methodologically rigorous ethnography, the book goes beyond recounting oral histories and uncovers how real people (re)construct memories of the past in the present through their interactions with social networks, state-sponsored memory projects, the court system, political discourses, and religious practices. Rich and compelling, Evoking Polish Memory is a rare success story in interdisciplinary research, taking an anthropological approach to questions of interest to political scientists, legal scholars, sociologists, and historians. Some minor revisions would strengthen the book even further and ensure that it garners the wider readership it deserves.
A decade after 1989, Poland began experiencing a "memory boom." This explosion in cultural productions dealing with the past inspired scholarly research on collective memory in fields as diverse as Anthropology, Archeology, Art History, Communications, Cultural Studies, History, Film, Languages and Linguistics, Literature, Journalism, Media Studies, Museum Studies, Political Science, Psychology, and Sociology. While this intellectual surge drew inspiration from classical works produced earlier in Western Europe and the United States, it also produced a plethora of new concepts, theories, and perspectives rooted in the Central European experience and drew on classical Polish authors. This incredibly rich field of inquiry presents an intellectual labyrinth that can be difficult to navigate. Novices may have trouble finding their bearings, while seasoned scholars may talk past each other, each using terms native to their disciplines for lack of a common language.