The Best Legal Movie Lines
Adam Freedman ·
February 26, 2012 at 3:28pm
In honor of Oscar Night, the editors of Bloomberg Law have posted a selection of the top 10 lines from law-related movies. What do you think?
I think it's pretty good, but they completely overlooked my all-time favorite Witness for the Prosecution, the 1957 Billy Wilder movie with Charles Laughton, Tyrone Power, and Marlene Dietrich. It's full of great lines, but I'm especially fond of the moment when Charles Laughton (playing the defense barrister) destroys Dietrich on cross-examination with this: "The question is whether you were lying then or are you lying now... or whether in fact you are a chronic and habitual LIAR!"
What's your favorite legal movie line?
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Comments:
Mar '11
Re: The Best Legal Movie Lines
"If the law supposes that, then the law is a ass, a idiot! If that's the eye of the law, then the law is a bachelor. And the worst I wish the law is that his eye may be opened by experience."
Dec '10
Re: The Best Legal Movie Lines
"You can't handle the truth!"
Apr '11
Re: The Best Legal Movie Lines
"I wanted to get a writ of habeas corpus, but I should've gotten rid of you instead." Groucho Marx, Duck Soup
Feb '12
Re: The Best Legal Movie Lines
Could we please establish a few ground rules for this thread?
Feb '12
Re: The Best Legal Movie Lines
Dagnabbit! I knew I should have posted the ground rules faster.
Nov '11
Re: The Best Legal Movie Lines
"Herr Rolfe, I have admired your work in the court for many months. You are particularly brilliant in your use of logic. So, what you suggest may very well happen. It is logical, in view of the times in which we live. But to be logical is not to be right, and nothing on God's earth could ever make it right!"
Feb '12
Re: The Best Legal Movie Lines
Just about quotation from Intolerable Cruelty, the only movie that ever made me interested in being a lawyer. This is a particularly good exchange, in the spirit of the great old comedians. And I would love to have a negotiation like this one sometime (warning: linked video begins with a little colorful language):
Mar '11
Re: The Best Legal Movie Lines
Do Star Trek episodes count? I love the scene that climaxes in this speech by Samuel T. Cogley, defending James T. Kirk against murder and perjury charges: “I speak of rights: A machine has none; a man must. My client has the right to face his accuser, and if you do not grant him that right, you have brought us down to the level of the machine—indeed, you have elevated that machine above us! I ask that my motion be granted. And more than that, gentlemen, in the name of a humanity fading in the shadow of the machine, I demand it. I demand it!”
Dec '11
Re: The Best Legal Movie Lines
I know its just a TV show but if memory serves...from Boston Legal, James Spader advises a new lawyer, "The secret to persuading a jury is sincerity. Once you can fake that, you've got in made."
Re: The Best Legal Movie Lines
Anatomy of a Murder remains my favorite courtroom drama, and not just for the presence of the fetching Lee Remick: "As a lawyer, I've had to learn that people aren't just good or just bad. People are many things."
Mar '11
Re: The Best Legal Movie Lines
-- Henry VI, part 2.
May '10
Re: The Best Legal Movie Lines
Every line of the courtroom scene of A Man for All Seasons is a gem.
Take this: "The world will construe according to its wits. This court must construe according to the law."
Or this: "I am the king's true subject, and I pray for him and all the realm. I do none harm. I say none harm. I think none harm. And if this be not enough to keep a man alive, then in good faith, I long not to live."
Edited on February 26, 2012 at 5:12pmMar '11
Re: The Best Legal Movie Lines
[Fiorello and Otis P. Driftwood are going over a contract]
-- A Night at the Opera.
Edited on February 26, 2012 at 4:56pmSep '11
Re: The Best Legal Movie Lines
"So, Mr. Tipton, how could it take you 5 minutes to cook your grits when it takes the entire grit eating world 20 minutes? "
Mar '11
Re: The Best Legal Movie Lines
How could they have missed this, from "And Justice for All"?
Judge Rayford: Mr. Kirkland you are out of order!
Arthur Kirkland: You're out of order! You're out of order! The whole trial is out of order! They're out of order! That man, that sick, crazy, depraved man, raped and beat that woman there, and he'd like to do it again!
Feb '11
Re: The Best Legal Movie Lines
Percival: [Fiorello and Otis P. Driftwood are going over a contract]
-- A Night at the Opera.· 12 minutes ago
Edited 10 minutes ago
And there is no such thing as a sanity clause!
Feb '12
Re: The Best Legal Movie Lines
Also from My Cousin Vinny: "What's a yoot?"
Jun '11
Re: The Best Legal Movie Lines
"The fact of the matter is that war changes men's natures. The barbarities of war are seldom committed by abnormal men. The tragedy of war is that these horrors are committed by normal men in abnormal situations. Situations in which the ebb and flow of everyday life have departed and have been replaced by a constant round of fear and anger, blood and death. Soldiers at war are not to be judged by civilian rules, even though they commit acts which calmly viewed afterwards could only be seen as un-Christian and brutal. We cannot hope to judge such matters unless we ourselves have been submitted to the same pressures, the same provocations, as these men, whose actions are on trial." - Maj. J.F. Thomas
From one of my favorite movies, bar none. The "Rule .303" speech isn't a bad little monologue either.
Edited on February 26, 2012 at 5:52pmMay '10
Re: The Best Legal Movie Lines
From the verdict in Judgment at Nuremberg:
"Janning, to be sure, is a tragic figure. We believe he loathed the evil he did. But compassion for the present torture of his soul must not beget forgetfulness of the torture and death of millions by the government of which he was a part. Janning's record and his fate illuminate the most shattering truth that has emerged from this trial. If he and the other defendants were all depraved perverts - if the leaders of the Third Reich were sadistic monsters and maniacs - these events would have no more moral significance than an earthquake or other natural catastrophes...."
Continued below
May '10
Re: The Best Legal Movie Lines
From above
"But this trial has shown that under the stress of a national crisis, men - even able and extraordinary men - can delude themselves into the commission of crimes and atrocities so vast and heinous as to stagger the imagination. No one who has sat through this trial can ever forget. The sterilization of men because of their political beliefs... The murder of children... How easily that can happen! There are those in our country today, too, who speak of the "protection" of the country. Of "survival". The answer to that is: survival as what? A country isn't a rock. And it isn't an extension of one's self. It's what it stands for, when standing for something is the most difficult! Before the people of the world - let it now be noted in our decision here that this is what we stand for: justice, truth... and the value of a single human being!