In Shakespeare’s play Measure for Measure, one character says to another : “The law hath not been dead, though it hath slept.” That line is spoken by Angelo, a deputy to the Duke of Vienna, who is himself put in charge of the law when the Duke leaves town. As soon as he takes up leadership, Angelo decides he will enforce an old law that dictates that anyone who has sex outside of marriage will be put to death. The first victim of this new law is to be Claudio, whose sister Isabella comes to Angelo to ask why her brother should be condemned to death when so many others who have done the same thing have not been punished for it. Angelo responds with that classic line about the law, a line which could refer to the newly enforced law itself but also to justice in our world in general. Is justice dead, or is it just sleeping?
Among the many genres and types of films that play our cinemas, perhaps there is none like the courtroom drama for riveting our focus on questions of justice. In many different fashions, these films explore the profound question of whether the justice among us really is dead or whether it is only sleeping. If we follow the line of this questioning throughout the eras of film history, we can watch how much things have changed but also get a glimpse of how the basic questions really haven’t changed.
A happy happenstance came about when I recently watched two landmark courtroom dramas within a few days of one another. The time gap between the making of these two films stretches an imposing six decades of time. At one end of this time rainbow, Sandra Hüller sits in a modern-day French courtroom dock in Justine Triet’s 2023 Anatomy of a Fall as Sandra Voyter, a woman accused of killing her husband. At the other end, Gregory Peck stands his ground as lawyer Atticus Finch. Finch can be found in Robert Mulligan’s 1962 film version of Harper’s Lee’s novel To Kill a Mockingbird. When we consider that Finch was living in 1930’s Alabama, we can imagine almost a complete century spanning the gap between the two figures and the two films.
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Both of these films paint on a wide canvas, but I would like to simplify our view by zooming in on the courtroom scene in each film that viewers will likely remember most. Let us consider how each of these scenes speaks to questions of justice.
For Anatomy of a Fall, the scene of note is the one in which Sandra and everyone in court listen to an audio recording of a conversation between Sandra and her husband on the day before his death. The experience of this recording is harrowing for us viewers. It is a conversation that we see initially, in a visual flashback calm enough to include a shared glass of wine, and then only hear as it comes to a violent confrontation between the two. The scene is followed by a discussion about how to interpret the recording itself and whether it can be used as evidence against Sandra or not. Sandra’s lawyer Vincent says at this point, “This is about believing or not believing. It’s a subjective opinion.” Following on the heels of this discussion, the film ultimately becomes more about stories and the ways we spin them rather than Sandra’s actual guilt or innocence. The film may not say whether justice is dead or sleeping, but the confusion about the interpretation of all these events (along with the way subjectivity seems to play such a large role in the decision-making) makes us feel that justice will not be an easy giant to awaken.
Now we will jump one century backwards, as it were, and find Atticus Finch in To Kill a Mockingbird. He is addressing the 1930’s Alabama jury who must deliver the verdict that will decide the fate of Tom Robinson. Robinson is the African American man who has been accused of beating and raping a white woman named Mayella Ewell. After declaring that the state has not produced any evidence that this crime took place, Finch looks the all-white jury straight in the eye and ardently pleads, “Now I am confident that you gentlemen will review, without passion, the evidence that you have heard, come to a decision, and restore this man to his family.” Then, after a deep pause, Finch brings down the hammer : “In the name of God, do your duty.” Disdaining both God and their duty, the jury then delivers a guilty verdict. This punch in the face of justice seems to have become a death blow by the time we hear that Tom was killed while being transferred to prison as he was trying to escape.
Early in Atticus’s speech, he had stated his conviction that, “In our courts, all men are created equal.” The court of this film’s story, of course, ultimately falls painfully short of that beautiful aspiration. So again the question : Is justice dead, or is it just sleeping? Though Mockingbird, of the two films we have examined, is the one most tied to a specific era of human history, it is also the one that tortures audiences right here and now with the possibility that justice is truly dead in our world.
Were it not for the potent example of mercy embodied by Peck as Atticus Finch in the face of this “dead justice” that we see in the film, we the audience would want to crawl off to a cave somewhere to lick our wounds. Instead we are inspired by the vocal emphasis we get from Peck as Finch as he invokes the name of God to the jury : “In the name of God, do your duty.” The jury and our earthly systems of justice may not seem to care about God being invoked as the authority and motivation to see justice done. A little child, though, may care enough to hear this invocation and run with it into the future. In the film, that line from Finch is followed directly by a cut to Finch’s son Jem listening intently to what his father is saying. If the seeds of loving and merciful justice can be planted in the next generation of hearers, the movie seems to suggest, justice has some chance of living and being fully awake as the decades march forward. I pray it would be so, even in spite of all the confusing stories we tell ourselves and each other.
