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Why a Jury Trial is More Like a Movie Than a Novel
Author(s) -
Meyer Phil
Publication year - 2001
Publication title -
journal of law and society
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.263
H-Index - 48
eISSN - 1467-6478
pISSN - 0263-323X
DOI - 10.1111/1467-6478.00183
Subject(s) - jury , jury trial , process (computing) , adaptation (eye) , political science , law , sociology , psychology , aesthetics , epistemology , computer science , art , philosophy , neuroscience , operating system
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.