Wonder Woman is a box office hit; Rotten Tomatoes rates it at 92 percent. This past week, I saw it with the Bracewell first year and summer associates and was wowed. But what is little known to lawyers—despite a brilliant book by Harvard historian Jill Lepore—is the role of Wonder Woman's creator, Dr. William Mouton Marston, in the history of evidence law. Lepore's discoveries deserve retelling now that Wonder Woman is back.

William Marston was born in Massachusetts in 1893 and educated at Harvard University. There, he studied with Professor Hugo Munsterberg and worked in his psychological laboratory, where the professor and his students conducted experiments designed to detect deception. In his junior year, Marston designed an experiment to determine whether systolic blood pressure could be used to determine if someone was lying.

The machine that he created was the first lie detector.