There’s some pretense amongst the Ivory Tower crowd that they are capable of, and it’s worth their while, dissecting fiction as if it was something that actually happened.  I thought this was mind-bogglingly stupid when it involved Harry Potter, and it’s no less stupid when it involves 12 Angry Men.

A debate has broken out at Libertarian Central (a/k/a Volokh) over whether the Henry Fonda’s character put the prosecution to an unfair burden, raising questions in deliberations that were never raised during the unseen trial, according to Conspirator David Bernstein.   Ilya Somin then chimes in that while Fonda was able to counter individual arguments, he failed to overcome the cumulative weight of the evidence.

Guys, it’s a story.  It never actually happened.  You see, this other guy named Reginald Rose wrote words on paper and created a story.  It was turned into a movie, starring Henry Fonda.  Fonda studied and studied the words on the paper and then spoke them dramatically in front of movie cameras.  Later, they sold tickets and people saw the movie.  But it was only a movie.

Thankfully,  Orin Kerr jumps in to assume the novel role as the voice of reason.  Rather than get caught in the odd world of what “really” happened, Orin explains the author’s use of the jury as proxy for telling the story of the trial through their eyes.  It was the literary device that made 12 Angry Men such a good movie. 

The audience never even hears any testimony, and what we hear second-hand from the jurors is conflicting. It’s conflicting for a reason, I think; the idea is to make the audience dwell on the difference between guilt and the absence of reasonable doubt of guilt.

Yes!  Yes!  It was a good movie because it created thoughtful tension, making the audience ponder.  What a great idea for a movie.  What a well executed movie.  But it’s a movie.

I have no problem with lawprofs giving movie reviews, even if the movies were made long before any of their readers (or they) were born. (12 Angry Men, Sidney Lumet, 1957)  But if you want to put on scholarly airs, discussing the merits of legal and procedural improprieties, don’t you think it would be more productive to do so with things that are, oh, real?  What’s next, a dissertation on the concert contractual obligations of the Spice Girls in Spice World (1997)?