The nine cases cover the period from colonial times to the present and include women charged with witchcraft, assassination and murder, espionage, child molestation, and bank robbery. A critical perspective of the nine cases is presented based on an analysis of trial records. The author shows how trial logic embodies history and gender, identifies limitations of legal procedures, and describes ways in which litigants constructed situational rationality. She also shows how popular trials mirror interests, values, and controversies of society and how such trials encourage both vicarious and direct public participation in debates about morality, justice, fairness, gender, relationships, and motherhood. Analysis of the nine cases assumes that legal argument is constitutive, reflects changes in contexts, embodies values of arguers, and provides a historical and textual record of reasoning. Each book chapter analyzes how arguers rhetorically construct legal events, the goal being to understand how legal participants constructed trial logic and how trial logic included values of the historical era, perceptions about women, and legal statutes and procedures. 364 references