A lesser man might consider it over-ambitious to attempt to distil more than 4,000 years of legal history into a mere 360 pages. Not Sadakat Kadri, it would seem, who has managed to do just that, while also practising law in New York and the UK. He's also (rather irritatingly) managed to making it genuinely interesting. He tells the story of Socrates's trial and execution in 399BC as though he had watched events from the public gallery, in much the same fashion as he discusses the Milosevic trial in the Hague.

The book encompasses gruesome 9th-century trials by ordeal (plunging a suspect's arm into boiling water and waiting three days to determine guilt by the state of the blisters), through the hysterical accusations made during the Salem witch trials (at one point, so many claims of sorcery were made that one in 12 of the town's inhabitants was in custody) to Perry Mason.

Kadri includes highly vivid descriptions of hanging, shooting, drawing and quartering, drowning and, memorably, a papal inquisitor burning alive a dying Cathar woman before returning to his refectory for lunch.

Such barbarism is alien to the modern reader, but it is a timely book. Kadri makes it clear how long it has taken to arrive at this supposedly high point in judicial history, and consequently fires a warning shot at those who seek to erode hard-won legal traditions, like freedom from detention without trial or the right to a public hearing, in the name of safeguarding the community at large.