From Truth to Technique addresses key questions raised by the burgeoning literature in what Philip Gaines calls advocacy advice texts-manuals, handbooks, and other how-to guides-written by lawyers for lawyers, both practicing and aspiring, to help them be as effective as possible in trial advocacy. In these texts, advice authors share principles, strategies, and techniques for persuading juries and winning cases. Some manuals even form the basis for required advocacy courses in law schools. Unlike training manuals in other professional domains-sales, leadership, management, fundraising, coaching, etc.-advocacy advice texts offer guidance for effectiveness in a realm of activity where the stakes may be the very highest for the parties and where society has an abiding interest in the truth being discovered and justice being done. Helping advocates learn how to win cases may be the ultimate purpose of advice texts, but to what extent are ideas about the values of truth and justice-what Gaines calls metavalues-incorporated into discussions about winning tactics and techniques? To explore this question, Gaines takes the reader through a discursive history of the relation between technique and metavalues as presented in advocacy advice-beginning with a thematic analysis of the first texts published in the Anglo-American tradition in the early 17th century, through treatises written during seasons of radical change in the profession in the 18th and 19th centuries, and up to the present day with a look at the more than 200 trial manuals currently in print. This diacronic study reveals dramatic changes in the place authors give to the metavalues of truth and justice when lawyers advise other lawyers about how to be effective in the courtroom.

The environmental humanities-founded on the indivisible human-environment nexus-focus on socioeconomic inequalities, injustices, and various cultural differences to explain environmental degradation and crises and to propose solutions. The Bangladesh Environmental Humanities Reader: Environmental Justice, Developmental Victimhood, and Resistance presents unique analyses of Bangladesh's environment-development relationships. The book looks at developmental victimhood, environmental injustices, and resistance of the marginalized in Bangladesh. It reflects how the popular GDP-based economic development model motivates governments of Bangladesh to undertake infrastructural and "development" projects, the growth of which threatens environment and livelihood of the poorer sections while benefiting the affluent profiteers. The book also critically engages with environmentalism represented through the literary works in Bangla through tales of pollution, depletion, and human-nature symbiosis, showing ways to achieve social justice to resist victimhood through art. Moreover, agricultural technologies shaped by cultivators-scientists' collaborations are often helpful for biodiversity conservation, notwithstanding those that ruin ecology and livelihood. Against the backdrop of climate change challenges, this book shows how politics and technology meet in many cross-cutting pathways.