Abstract: In Outside the Law, eighteen extraordinary voices explore the difference, often achingly personal, between true justice and the law. These original pieces use powerful storytelling - as immediate as Clarence Page writing on the Simpson trial and Blanche McCrary Boyd on Susan Smith - to define justice, to give it a face, to show how justice affects the lives of every one of us. The distinguished contributors ask questions like "How do we know what is just?" and "What are the effects of injustice?" and they refuse to let their responses remain in the realm of the abstract. John Edgar Wideman examines his son's imprisonment for murder to reveal how law is often a tragic approximation of justice, and Daniel J. Wideman, in one of the book's several instances of how the warp of justice affects generations of family, gives his own conception of his brother's incarceration. Sarah Pettit writes on the "dizzy spin" of gay Americans who are told they are seeking "special rights"; Julia Alvarez recounts the lingering effects of a brutal political regime on the civic behavior of her parents; and Madison Smartt Bell examines the perhaps illusory idea of an inner sense of "true morality." Charles Johnson imagines a black man, a white woman, and justice in the workplace, and Richard Bausch writes on a shameful boyhood incident - and the cultural assumptions that led to it.