At the conclusion of Minpeco v. Hunt, Judge Morris E. Lasker said that books could be written about the novel procedural and evidentiary issues involved in the case. Expert witnesses on both sides of the case agreed that the economic issues developed in the case were also novel. Yet little of the extraordinary scholarship from the trial has been preserved.

Fortunately, Jeffrey Williams, in this remarkable volume, records important segments of the knowledge developed in the Hunt silver litigation and raises significant questions for future discussion. The book is based not only on his own work as an expert witness in the silver litigation, but also the trial transcript and post-trial interviews with the lawyers and economist expert witnesses who served on both sides. We all owe Professor Williams a debt of gratitude for his efforts and achievements.

The discussion of the economic issues developed in the silver litigation is clearly of great significance. In scope and complexity, those economic issues and their intersection with the legal concepts of manipulation under the commodity laws and price fixing and monopolization under the antitrust laws may be unprecedented.

Perhaps more important than the preservation of the economic issues, however, are the questions raised by Minpeco v. Hunt and by Professor Williams in this volume: (1) What is “manipulation”? (2) What is the role of the expert in litigation and at trial? (3) What is the role of the jury in complex trials?