Editing Legal drama (section)

== Inaccurate portrayal of legal practice ==
It is widely believed by most practicing lawyers that legal dramas result in the general public having misconceptions about the legal process. Many of these misconceptions result from the desire to create an interesting story. For example, because conflict between parties make for an interesting story, legal dramas emphasize the [[trial (law)|trial]] and ignore the fact that the vast majority of [[civil law (common law)|civil]] and [[criminal law|criminal]] cases in the United States are settled out of court.<ref>{{Cite journal|last=Eisenberg|first=Theodore|date=March 2009|title=What is the Settlement Rate and Why Should We Care?|url=https://scholarship.law.cornell.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1202&context=facpub|journal=Journal of Empirical Legal Studies|volume=6|pages=111–146|doi=10.1111/j.1740-1461.2009.01139.x}}</ref> Trials in legal dramas are often shown to be more emphatic by disregarding actual rules in trials that prevent [[Relevance (law)|prejudicing]] defendants from juries.

Besides the actual practice of law, legal dramas may also misrepresent the character of lawyers in general. The lawyers in question fall under different variations, the character representations include the zealous heroic lawyers fighting to save their client's case, or putting criminals in jail, another is the sleazy distrustful attorney performing morally questionable acts to win the case, another may be the conflicted lawyer who is forced into a moral dilemma of having to defend a guilty client. These representations are not reflective of how lawyers act in real life as their job is to remain neutral to the law and ensure every person gets a fair and equal trial, regardless of their guilt.

Speaking at a screening of ''12 Angry Men'' during the 2010 [[Fordham University Law School]] Film festival, US [[Supreme Court Justice]] [[Sonia Sotomayor]] stated that seeing ''12 Angry Men'' while she was in college influenced her decision to pursue a career in law. She was particularly inspired by immigrant Juror 11's monologue on his reverence for the American justice system. She also told the audience of law students that, as a lower-court judge, she would sometimes instruct juries to not follow the film's example, because most of the jurors' conclusions are based on speculation, not fact.<ref>{{Citation| last = Semple | first = Kirk| title = The Movie That Made a Supreme Court Justice| newspaper = The New York Times| date = October 18, 2010| url = https://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/18/nyregion/18sonia.html| access-date =October 18, 2010}}</ref> Sotomayor noted that events from the film such as entering a similar knife into the proceeding; performing outside research into the case matter in the first place; and ultimately the jury as a whole making broad, wide-ranging assumptions far beyond the scope of reasonable doubt would not be allowed in a real-life jury situation, and would in fact have yielded a [[mistrial (law)|mistrial]]<ref>{{cite web|url=http://www.nycourts.gov/cji/1-General/CJI2d.Jury_Admonitions.pdf |title=Jury Admonitions In Preliminary Instructions (Revised May 5, 2009)1 |access-date=June 23, 2011 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20100528102537/http://www.nycourts.gov/cji/1-General/CJI2d.Jury_Admonitions.pdf |archive-date=May 28, 2010 |url-status=dead }}</ref> (assuming, of course, that applicable law permitted the content of jury deliberations to be revealed).