In the Pink Room
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Description
Trial lawyers have been compared to actors, performance artists, playwrights, and directors. All comparisons are valid, to a point. Unlike playwrights, lawyers cannot make up information, but short of lying or suborning perjury, trial lawyers can do a great deal to influence their audience—the jury. Whatever adverse testimony a trial lawyer cannot explain away or counter with competing testimony, she will seek to contextualize in a way that benefits the client or, failing that, harms him as little as possible. The trial lawyer will do that in cross-examination and in the two speeches to the jury—the opening statement and summation—that bracket a trial. She will use all the tools of play acting, to the extent of her ability, including gesture, facial expression, sarcasm, rhetorical questions, word choice, simile and metaphor, silence, tone, and volume. Her opponent will do the same, constructing a different narrative with the same body of evidence. A trial can, in fact, be seen as a contest between dueling narratives. Duelists are not ordinarily inclined to aid each other. Yet litigation, like traditional duels, does have rules and a few of them do require a lawyer to assist an opponent's case even if it means harming her own. Given the adversarial nature of trials, and the natural desire of lawyers to win, these rules are not always honored. In the following story, they were not.
Source Publication
Legal Ethics Stories
Source Editors/Authors
Deborah L. Rhode, David J. Luban
Publication Date
2006
Recommended Citation
Gillers, Stephen, "In the Pink Room" (2006). Faculty Chapters. 1248.
https://gretchen.law.nyu.edu/fac-chapt/1248
