This book offers a collection of essays by arguably the most popular legal historian writing today. Most of the essays have not been previously published, and those which have appeared previously have been re-written to make the collection read more coherently. The collection is centred upon the theme of the leading case - a case where the judgment has established a long-lasting or far reaching precedent in common law, and the author has selected a number of these cases in order to illustrate how the precedents established by the cases have little or nothing to do with the trials themselves.