Justice isn't the goal: What legal films teach us
Lessons learned from movies that made me angry enough to go to law school
There is nothing more infuriating than watching someone who clearly did something wrong walk free because of a procedural technicality. Every time it happens — on TV, in a movie, in real life — I feel my blood pressure spike. How can we possibly call that justice? How can a system that lets an armed robber go free because the rules weren’t followed perfectly be considered just? We’re told the American legal system is just, neutral, and fair. But the more I study law (and the more legal media I consume), the more obvious it becomes that justice is not the goal — resolution is.
I felt this deeply while watching Suits, when the man who attacked Louis Litt walks free because the proper procedures weren’t followed. The show treats it as a hard lesson in how the law works, but my reaction was much more simple: you’re seriously going to let someone who committed an armed robbery walk because of a paperwork failure? If that’s justice, it’s deeply unsatisfying.
That frustration isn’t due to a lack of knowledge of the law, it’s a reaction to how the American legal system is structured. The U.S. has an adversarial legal system, meaning the court’s main goal is to settle a dispute between two parties. The goal is not necessarily to find the truth. In our system, two opposing sides present their strongest versions of the story, and a neutral decision-maker (either a jury or a judge) chooses between them.
In theory, the truth would emerge in the end. But in reality, that only works when both sides have equal access to power, resources, money and expertise, which is almost never the case. The system doesn’t leave room for correction when it comes to inequality — it rewards whoever can argue better or present a better narrative.
I spent the month of January taking a class called Law and Film, and several of the movies we watched encouraged this rage to stay with me a little longer. In A Civil Action, the legal system technically works as its intended — motions are filed, procedures are followed, and rules are obeyed, but the outcome feels morally hollow. Truth is hidden, accountability is avoided, and the people who were harmed are left without real justice. The film doesn’t show the system breaking, it shows the system doing exactly what it was designed to do.
Similarly, Anatomy of a Murder puts the audience in an uncomfortable position. The case turns not on discovering an objective truth, but on narrative framing, credibility, and which version of events fits cleanly within legal lines. By the end, we may get a verdict, but certainty isn’t there. The film asks whether winning a case and uncovering the truth are even the same thing.
Other legal systems approach this problem differently. In inquisitorial systems, judges take an active role in investigating facts and finding the truth. The court acts not as a referee between two sides, but as an active participant in fact-finding. America rejects this system out of fear of giving the government too much power. Those concerns are not irrational, but the alternative we’ve chosen has come with its own costs.
Those costs show up most clearly in the tension between procedural justice and substantive justice. Procedural justice asks whether the rules were followed. Substantive justice asks whether the outcome was actually right. American law overwhelmingly prioritizes procedural justice. If the procedure was fair, the result is treated as legitimate, even if it is morally indefensible. We end up defending outcomes that everyone recognizes as wrong, simply because every box on the list was checked.
Legal films and television shows force us to sit with that discomfort. When someone walked free on a technicality, I instinctively said, “That’s not justice.” But the legal system has an answer: justice was never promised, only a fair process was. What these stories expose is the gap between what we want the law to do and what it is actually designed to accomplish.
Over time, repeated exposure to these outcomes has conditioned us to accept that “that’s just how the system works.” Procedure becomes sacred, outcomes become a byproduct, and moral outrage gets reframed as weakness. Questioning whether a system produces just results is absolutely necessary.
Media plays a crucial role here. Movies and television don’t just entertain, they reflect what the majority of the population already believes. If it were too far-fetched, it wouldn’t sell. In Hollywood, realism sells. When legal media repeatedly shows us that justice is optional but rules are inviolable, it reveals the system’s flaws and trains us that we just have to live with them.
A system that treats procedure as an end rather than a means will always struggle to justify itself morally. If following the rules consistently produce outcomes that feel wrong, the problem lies in a deeper, intentional structural design.
Anger at these stories isn’t something to suppress, it’s something to use. Law doesn’t change when people accept it quietly, it changes when people understand it well enough to challenge it.