Shadow of the law

The shadow of the law is a concept in American legal literature which refers to settling cases or making plea bargains in a way that takes into account what would happen at trial. It has been argued that criminal trials resolve such a small percentage of criminal cases "that their shadows are faint and hard to discern."^[1]

The phrase was coined by law professors Robert H. Mnookin and Lewis Kornhauser (when they were colleagues at the University of California, Berkeley), and was popularized by them in a 1979 law review article; it has since become common in sociolegal literature.^[2][3]

Today, Mnookin and Kornhauser's 1979 article is widely recognized as a landmark article "which legitimized the study of negotiation within the legal academy" by "tethering bargaining to jurisprudence".^[4] A 2012 study determined that as of that year, it was the nineteenth most-cited law review article of all time.^[5]