THE HUNDRED-YEAR DECLINE OF TRIALS AND THE THIRTY YEARS WAR
Although it defies popular images of the ubiquity of trials, an abundance of data shows that the number of trials federal and state, civil and criminal, jury and bench is declining.1 The shrinking number of trials is particularly striking because virtually everything else in the legal world is growing the population of lawyers, the number of cases, expenditures on law, the amount of regulation, the volume of authoritative legal material, and not least the place of law, lawyers, and courts in public consciousness.2 But, curiously, the image of law in public consciousness is centered on the trial. The media's obsession with trials, fictional and otherwise, combines with myths about excessive litigation to make the decline invisible to the public and, in large measure, to legal professionals.