I Could Never Sell

Why so many good novels and movies about lawyers and trials?

[Robinson] now lives in The Hague and is a legal advisor to ex-Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic, who is on trial for war crimes at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia.

Robinson is so enthusiastic about his work that he has written a novel in which a lawyer represents a notorious Serbian warlord accused of ethnic cleansing in Bosnia. He sells his book through his web site www.peterrobinson.com

For one thing, lawyers are storytellers.  First and foremost, lawyers make stories.  They sell stories.

A prosecutor and defense attorney offer competing stories.  Something went wrong.  Someone is harmed.  Someone’s to blame.   The story explains what went wrong, and who should put it right.  Says Lieutenant Kaffee in A Few Good Men:

A jury trial is about assigning blame.

Santiago’s dead. They want to know who’s to blame. They say [our clients] Dawson and Downey.  We say Kendrick [, their commanding officer].

Kaffee knows he can’t get his guys off unless he gives the jury someone else to blame.  In court you can’t win with a story that ends “these things happen” or “shit happens.”

The story is about the jury and the jurors too:

• You are avengers.
• You are defenders of justice.
• You are tough but fair.
• You are generous and merciful.
• You are understanding.
• You are shrewd, not sentimental.
• You have the courage to do the unpopular thing.
• You look out for the majority of people who play by the rules.
• You look out for the forgotten people.
• You look out for the misunderstood people.

The jurors get two stories, two explanations, two ways to place blame, but the jurors also get two views of themselves to choose from, two stories to tell of their duty.

In the movie The Sweet Hereafter (based on the novel by Russell Banks) a lawyer comes to a tiny town in the far north that has lost all its school-age children in one horrifying school bus accident.  The second time through the movie, when you’ve seen the bus slide off the road and across the ice of the river and then sink, you watch in horror as the bus goes from house to house that morning, picking up each child in front of each house from each soon-to-be-devastated parent.

Then a lawyer comes to town to recruit the grieving parents for a group lawsuit.  He visits them one by one and offers his condolences and offers them a story, an explanation, an explanation to be offered in court.   It’s a story of the dead children, and the story of someone to blame.   He will help them tell their child’s story, he says, and give it a new ending.  He will make sense of this, and give this sorrow an explanation and a meaning and even a remedy: someone must be made to put this right.

He offers the parents a view of themselves too, a story of themselves.  They are defending other children, children to come, even in their grief, though it’s too late to defend their own.  That’s the kind of people you are, he tells them.

Soon the town is bitterly divided about the lawyer and his story.  Some parents refuse to join his lawsuit, and try to dissuade the others.  They offer a different story of the lawyer and his recruits.  He’s greedy, an ambulance chaser, a hypocrite, a symptom of an irresponsible era that lies to itself  first and then others, that dresses up the lowest motives as the loftiest.  We aren’t that kind of people here.  You aren’t that kind of person.  Tell him no.  Tell him to go back to his kind and leave us to grieve in our way, our simple honest way.

Story versus story versus story, and may the best story win.

The lawyer and his story are put to the test at last.  A witness, one of the few children to escape the sinking bus, tells her story at a deposition, and her story assigns blame, but not to anyone with money enough to interest this lawyer, not to a state or county agency, not to a manufacturer, not to industry lobbyists at the legislature, but to the bus driver.  The lawyer packs up in defeat.

The girl is lying, and yet her lie does justice of a kind to the lawyer and to her father, who has joined the lawsuit and has big money in mind.

Her story gives the court someone to blame.  She doesn’t just blame the weather or the workings of chance.  A story for the court, she understands, must end with someone to blame.  Her account is false, but defeats the far worse account offered by the lawyer.  Her story beats his.

Her story also turns away from her father and his story.  He has been sleeping with her for years, in secret.  Her lie to the court defeats his bigger lie, and starts a new story in its place, her own story…

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