The book is Lawyerland, published in May by Farrar, Straus & Giroux (New York, $22). Joseph explains in a note to readers that since Lawyerland consists of exchanges between a narrator and members of the legal profession, "there was no other way to write it" without losing the grittiness and pithiness of frank lawyerly speech. He changed the names and characteristics of persons and places, but the eight dialogs--which are delightfully thick for interpretation from historical, literary and philosophical points of view as well as the legal--are "solidly based on facts." Names, places and personalities have been changed, but the result, nevertheless, is a book that many critics have said is hard to put down. "You might say it's truthful rather than factual," Joseph told Michigan Today. "The stories are something like moral tales or parables. They use devices of fiction to refract the truth."

With the permission of the author and his publisher, we publish the following excerpt. The narrator is meeting with federal Judge Celia Day. They begin to talk about how the legal profession's obligation to defend a client complicates the general moral principle that values truth-telling.