My Life in Court

Garden City, NY: Doubleday & Company, Inc, 1961. Presumed First Edition, First printing. Hardcover. good. Karsh (Jacket Photograph) and Arthur Shilstone (en. 524 pages. Endpaper illus. (sketches of Nizer). Inscribed by the author. One of America's most famous trial lawyers recounts some of his most significant cases. Louis Nizer (February 6, 1902 - November 10, 1994) was a noted Jewish-American trial lawyer. In 1928, he co-founded a law partnership: Phillips and Nizer, later Phillips, Nizer, Benjamin, Krim & Ballon. Nizer was listed in the Guinness Book of World Records as the "highest-paid lawyer in the world." He represented many celebrities in a variety of cases, including Johnny Carson, Salvador Dalí, Mae West, "Dr. J", and Roy Fruehauf. His most famous cases, however, involved representing Quentin Reynolds in his successful libel suit against columnist Westbrook Pegler, and representing the broadcaster John Henry Faulk against AWARE, a right-wing organization that had falsely labeled him a communist. His legal victory in the Faulk case was credited with "breaking the back of blacklisting in broadcasting." Derived from a Kirkus review: My Life in Court deals with six cases of charged and exciting interest, no one of which is a criminal case. The author, a brilliant student of the law, an eminent trial lawyer, takes the reader by the hand and introduces each of his cases with a treatment of the law involved, the essential facts, the preparation of the case to the minutest detail, and excerpts from the testimony. The six cases deal with different aspects of the law, of the type however that can be understood by laymen. The style is direct and orderly. The reader feels he is sitting at counsel table during examination and cross-examination, and enjoys the quiet, modest but effective manner in which he forces a witness to bare the truth without displaying any dramatics. Trial lawyers, law students and the general public will all find pleasure in this book.