Why a Jury Trial is More Like a Movie Than a Novel
| Published date | 01 March 2001 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/1467-6478.00183 |
| Date | 01 March 2001 |
JOURNAL OF LAW AND SOCIETY
VOLUME 28, NUMBER 1, MARCH 2001
ISSN: 0263-323X, pp. 133–46
Why a Jury Trial is More Like a Movie Than a Novel
Phil Meyer*
This essay is concerned to note the way in which successful trial
advocacy seems to stem from the ability to convert legal discourse into
a story form. These stories need to be ones with which a jury is
familiar. These increasingly come from visual media, particularly film.
It looks in detail at one trial where this process of relating a defence to
the jury employed the structure of a Mafia film. The essay concludes by
examining the reasons why the nature of the novel differs significantly
from that of the film and how in the novel-to-film adaptation process a
certain simplification is bound to occur.
Fiction goes everywhere, inside, outside, it stops, it goes, its action can be
mental. Nor is it time-driven. Film is time-driven, it never ruminates, it
shows the outside of life, it shows behavior. It tends to the simplest moral
reasoning. Films out of Hollywood are linear. The narrative simplification
of complex morally consequential reality is always the drift of a film
inspired by a book. Novels can do anything in the dark horrors of conscious-
ness. Films do close ups, car drive-ups, places, chases and explosions.
E.L. Doctorow
1
In a previous essay, I examined the filmic influences upon an attorney’s
closing argument to a jury in a criminal case.
2
After studying closing
arguments and trials, it became apparent to me that trial advocacy, especially
argument to a jury in a criminal case, is deeply imbedded in narrative
practices, certainly as deeply as in the analytical practices and paradigmatic
structures of rule based reasoning traditionally taught in law schools. The
essence of successful trial advocacy to a jury is the ability to combine legal
analytics with the storytelling ability of the artist within the ‘aesthetic’
constraints of form demanded by trial practice. This is not a ‘novel’
133
ßBlackwell Publishers Ltd 2001, 108 Cowley Road, Oxford OX4 1JF, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA
*Vermont Law School, Chelsea Street, PO Box 96, South Royalton, VT
05068, United States of America
1 E.L. Doctorow, City of God (2000) – quoted in New York Times Book Review, 5
March 2000, 7.
2 See P. Meyer, ‘Desperate for Love: Cinematic Influences Upon A Defendant’s
Closing Argument to a Jury (1994) 18 Vermont Law Rev. 721.
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