Evidence is the only subject taught in law schools with which every casual moviegoer has experience. The Courtroom Drama is a film genre unto itself, like the War movie or Cop Buddy flick. Every Cop Buddy movie needs an aging partner, on the brink of retirement when he is faced with his last, life-threatening case. In War films, a profane private from the Bronx, a black soldier from Mississippi, and an innocent from the Midwest are de rigeur characters. At least one of these will theatrically expire in the arms of his new, unlikely friend, demonstrating the irony of war, which is supposed to bring men together even as it forces them to blow other men to bits. The Courtroom Drama, similarly, must reach its dénouement in the courtroom, complete with surprise witnesses, a gruff, authoritarian judge and the vociferous objections of attorneys. This is why, when I began law school, I would have gone to a bakery to order a tort, but I already knew that relevancy, prejudice, and privilege were elements of the law of Evidence.

Presenting a case before a trier-of fact is like directing a Cop Buddy film, writing a spy thriller, or replicating what has already been put on screen, thousands of times, in Courtroom Dramas; a litigator, trying her case, is making a genre piece. If these examples are too prosaic, we can liken a lawyer’s job to that of the early English poets, whose creativity was bound by literary form and whose genius came from transcending that form: Shakespeare had to follow iambic pentameter, Milton was expected to invoke the Muses. Evidence provides the boundaries, the genre and the form, through which lawyers tell their clients’ stories. The greater the lawyer’s mastery of the form, the more freedom she maintains to tell the story the way she wants. Just as an author inspires joy or sadness by rewarding or disappointing the reader’s expectations, the lawyer must present her client’s case, and rebut her opposition’s case, in such a way that there is a predictable ending to the "litigation story." Well-told stories have satisfying conclusions. In litigation, that translates to favorable judgments. As the Woburn case shows, when clients cannot tell their stories, they lose in the courtroom even as they win in the press. You have urged us not to get so bogged down in the Rules that we lose sight of our responsibility, as lawyers and our clients’ representatives, to tell great stories. You have confidence in our ability, through self-study or professional practice, to learn the minutiae of the FRE. You want to teach us to use those rules in the way authors use plot devices, narrative form, and language structure.

There is a responsibility that comes with being a legal storyteller. This is something you have also tried to impart. Clarence Darrow, a great legal storyteller and one of my heroes, saw this when he resigned from his position as general counsel of the Chicago and North-Western Railway Company to defend the company’s workers and their union president, Eugene Debs, against prosecutions brought by the federal government. "[W]hen I saw poor men giving up their jobs for a cause," said Darrow in his autobiography, "I could find no sufficient excuse, except my own selfish interest, for refusing their request [for representation]." You have tried to show us that we retain a responsibility, not to causes but to ourselves, to use the lawyer’s privileges and powers in the service of those stories in which we believe, and which we believe should be told. There is a discretionary and therefore a moral component to the lawyer’s job.

A few nights ago, I read Philip Roth’s new novel. There is a scene at the book’s beginning that makes my point more eloquently. The narrator, a young boy, is speaking to Iron Rinn, the novel’s protagonist, an idealistic communist and radio personality whose career will be ruined when he is blacklisted by McCarthy and Nixon: