About the Book
Facts Can't Speak for Themselves Reveal the stories that give facts their meaning.
You can't tell where a legal decision-maker is going until you know where he or she is coming from. The book, Facts Can't Speak for Themselves, helps you find out where people are coming from, including the parts the jurors themselves can neither articulate nor even fully grasp on their own. The author Eric Oliver points out, those are the parts that most control every legal decision made both by professionals and by the lay juror. And, these mental processes are a lot more involved than influences traceable to zip codes, jobs, or lifestyles.
Facts Can't Speak for Themselves explains how your case story automatically reminds people of the private, stored references for where they are "coming from." Perceptions of your case spring out of the infinite number of possibilities in each fact-finder's unique warehouse of life experiences and unconscious imaginings. With them, all legal decision-makers first construct many versions from which they finally build a single story. According to the research, it is beyond dispute that those unconsciously imagined, private versions of the case story drive each decision-maker's judgments.