Louisiana State University Law Center LSU Law Digital Commons Journal Articles Faculty Scholarship 2003 Legal Fictions: Irony, Storytelling, Truth, and Justice in the Modern Courtroom Drama Christine Corcos Louisiana State University Law Center,
[email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.law.lsu.edu/faculty_scholarship Part of the Law Commons Repository Citation Corcos, Christine, "Legal Fictions: Irony, Storytelling, Truth, and Justice in the Modern Courtroom Drama" (2003). Journal Articles. 253. https://digitalcommons.law.lsu.edu/faculty_scholarship/253 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the Faculty Scholarship at LSU Law Digital Commons. It has been accepted for inclusion in Journal Articles by an authorized administrator of LSU Law Digital Commons. For more information, please contact
[email protected]. LEGAL FICTIONS: IRONY, STORYTELLING, TRUTH, AND JUSTICE IN THE MODERN COURTROOM DRAMA Christine Alice Corcos • If theparties will at my hands call for justice, then, all were it my father stood on the one side, and the Devil on the other, his cause being good, the Devil should have right.1 I've covered a lot of trials, and the one thing I would say is ... never confuse an acquittal with innocence.2 In the film Witness for the Prosecution,3 title character Christine Vole 4 suggests to the well-respected barrister Sir Wilfred Robards that the truth will not save her husband from the gallows. A miffed Robards responds that, on the contrary, "My dear Mrs. Vole, in our courts we will accept the evidence of witnesses who speak only Bulgarian and who must have an interpreter.