Robert Burns has written an important book on an institution that, while central to systems of criminal and civil justice, has been curiously neglected by academic lawyers. Some reasons for this neglect are addressed in an oblique fashion in his book, for they are linked to what he has described as the “Received View” of the trial. In this view, the trial is a formal process of fact finding and law application, where roles and responsibilities of judge, counsel, and jury are laid down according to a predetermined understanding of the rule of law. Since the trial is viewed merely as a mechanism for law application, academic lawyers have, by and large, preferred to focus on the appellate decisions that are seen as shaping the substance of the law. However, there are other reasons for this neglect, and they are linked to more recent trends in the academic study of the law. The sociological study of civil and criminal justice has been concerned with processes of plea bargaining and settlement, and with other means of diverting cases from the formal institutions of law, in seeking to argue that in practice the trial is not central to the operation of law. And while the critical legal studies movement has criticized the formalism and abstraction of legal scholarship, it has not sought to anchor the study of law in the concrete practices of legal institutions such as the trial, but instead in the social and political forces that shape law making—a position that has largely accepted the formalist account of the trial as a forum of rule application. We thus have two significant schools, one pulling toward the abstraction of rules from the context of their application, the other pulling towards the context in which rules are used or created, and the trial has been left somewhere in the middle.