Hollywood has been putting trials on screen for generations, and lawyers have been arguing about them just as long. In 2008, a panel of 12 lawyers who teach film or work in the business picked the 25 greatest legal movies for the ABA Journal. Their top four were To Kill a Mockingbird, 12 Angry Men, My Cousin Vinny and Anatomy of a Murder.
Those four films are still the ones trial lawyers bring up first. Some hold up well against a real courtroom. One of them, beloved as it is, shows a jury doing things a judge would never allow.
12 Angry Men, and the jury that broke the rules
Sidney Lumet's 1957 film came out of real jury duty. Writer Reginald Rose said he served on a manslaughter jury in New York in 1954 and realized few people knew what happened in deliberations, according to Wikipedia).
The film made a generation believe in reasonable doubt. Justice Sonia Sotomayor has said seeing it in college helped push her toward law. She has also pointed out its problems. At a 2010 Fordham Law screening, she said Juror 8 bringing in a similar knife, the jurors doing outside research and their broad inferences would not be allowed in a real jury room and would likely have produced a mistrial. As a lower-court judge, she said, she sometimes told jurors not to follow the film's example, because its conclusions rest on speculation.
That is the gap between drama and law. Real jurors decide on the evidence admitted in court, not on experiments they run themselves.
My Cousin Vinny, the comedy lawyers teach
The 1992 comedy is the surprise on the list, and few legal films get more respect from working lawyers. Director Jonathan Lynn holds a law degree from Cambridge, and it shows, according to Wikipedia.
Judges have cited it from the bench. In a 2019 D.C. Circuit opinion, then-Chief Judge Merrick Garland wrote that Vinny "taught a master class in cross-examination." Judge Richard Posner praised its lessons on handling a hostile judge, using props in cross-examination and working with experts. Justice Antonin Scalia pointed to it as an example of a defendant's right to choose his own lawyer.
The film gets the building blocks right. Vinny uses discovery to get the prosecution's file. He picks apart eyewitnesses on what they could actually see. And Mona Lisa Vito, played by Oscar winner Marisa Tomei, is qualified as an expert on the strength of her real knowledge of cars, which is how expert testimony is supposed to work.
Anatomy of a Murder, written by a defense lawyer
Otto Preminger's 1959 film came from a novel by John D. Voelker, a Michigan lawyer who wrote as Robert Traver. Voelker based it on a 1952 murder case in which he was the defense attorney, according to Wikipedia.
The film follows the building of an irresistible impulse defense, a form of temporary insanity, from first client interview to verdict. UCLA law professor Michael Asimow called it "probably the finest pure trial movie ever made." The judge was played by Joseph N. Welch, the real lawyer who confronted Senator Joseph McCarthy during the Army-McCarthy hearings. Chicago briefly banned the film over its frank language until Preminger won in federal court.
The rest of the list
Several other films on the ABA list draw directly from real proceedings. Much of the testimony in Inherit the Wind comes from the transcript of the Scopes trial. A Few Good Men grew out of a real military case prosecuted by David Iglesias. Reversal of Fortune is based on Alan Dershowitz's own account of the Claus von Bulow appeal.
The best courtroom movies do not get every rule right. What they get right is the work, the preparation, the cross-examination and the slow building of doubt. For a real trial lawyer's view of that work, read Fred Haddad on 50 years of trying cases. It is the kind of subject the Two Taps legal panel of Daniel Rosenberg, Michael Dye and Lloyd Golburgh takes apart on the show.
Two Taps News stories summarize reporting and the analysis discussed on Two Taps and Friends. They are not legal advice. Read our standards.
