Ralph Adam Fine

Ralph Adam Fine has been a judge on the Wisconsin Court of Appeals since 1988, and was a trial judge for nine years before that, presiding over more than 350 jury trials. He was also the presiding judge in the PBS Frontline production Inside the Jury Room, which was the first time jury deliberations in a criminal trial were filmed and broadcast.

Ralph Adam Fine has taught trial-advocacy, evidence, and appellate-advocacy at more than one-hundred-and-fifty continuing-legal-education programs around the country, in-house trial-advocacy workshops for law-firm litigation departments, and as Professorial Lecturer in Law at the George Washington University National Law Center in Washington, D.C. In 1995, the University of Virginia School of Law presented Ralph Adam Fine with the Honorable William J. Brennan, Jr., Award for his contributions to the teaching of trial advocacy. Among other recipients of the Brennan award are Justice Antonin Scalia and David Boies.

Ralph Adam Fine is the author of The How-To-Win Appeal Manual (Juris 2000), The How-To-Win Trial Manual (rev 3d ed. 2005), as well as the annually supplemented Fine's Wisconsin Evidence (Juris). Judge Jack B. Weinstein, original co-author of Weinstein's Federal Evidence, called Fine's Wisconsin Evidence "probably the best single-volume state treatise on the subject that I have seen." Gregory P. Joseph, former chair of the ABA Litigation Section, praised The How-To-Win Trial Manual as: "A succinct and masterful approach to trying cases." And Professor James W. McElhaney said the book will help make lawyers "better advocates." U.S. Court of Appeals Judge Alex Kozinski calls The How-To-Win Appeal Manual "an excellent compendium of tips on appellate advocacy" and reflected that he wishes "all my lawyers got a chance to study" it.

Ralph Adam Fine has also written: Escape of the Guilty (Dodd, Mead & Co. 1986), which was called "must reading" by The Wall Street Journal; The Great Drug Deception (Stein & Day 1972); and Mary Jane versus Pennsylvania (McCall 1970). He is a senior contributing editor and reporter for the four-volume treatise Evidence in America (Lexis); a contributor to the ABA publications Emerging Problems Under The Federal Rules of Evidence 2d Ed. (West 1991) and Emerging Problems Under The Federal Rules of Evidence 3d Ed. (Lexis 1998). He also has written two chapters for Criminal Justice?, edited by Robert James Bidinotto and published in 1995 by the Foundation for Economic Education; a chapter on the Eighth Amendment in A Time for Choices published in 1991 by the First Amendment Congress; and more than thirty professional-journal articles.

Ralph Adam Fine has analyzed legal issues on CBS's 60 Minutes, ABC's Nightline and Reader's Digest: On Television, PBS's MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour, CNN's Both Sides with Jesse Jackson, as well as a periodic guest on CNN's Crossfire and Larry King Live. From May, 1974, through December, 1975, he was a reporter for WITI-TV, the Milwaukee CBS television affiliate. Two of his reports won awards from the Milwaukee Press Club for journalistic excellence. From 1975 to 1978, he was host of A Fine Point, which featured such guests as Nobel laureates Elie Wiesel and Milton Friedman.

A 1962 graduate of Tufts University and a 1965 graduate of the Columbia Law School, Ralph Adam Fine is an elected member of the American Law Institute.