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Pavan Aniketh Mudunuru

BBA LLB Section C
10th of April 2019
Arup K. Chatterjee
Jindal Global Law School, OP Jindal Global University

How Movies Portray Lawyers’ Integrity and Moral Ethics.

“Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.” (Martin Luther King Jr.)1

Integrity and Moral ethics have played a major role in accommodation of justice and peace-
keeping. No matter how important it is to be an ethical person and support justice, integrity and
morals in the profession can be challenging for a lawyer given that there are two outcomes from a
court room: Justice and Injustice; and not every lawyer has the opportunity to serve justice all the time
and nor will all lawyers get to be on the side of justice. So an ethical or a moral lawyer cannot really
choose to be on the ‘right’ side all the time. But the way movies or the cinema portray a lawyer’s
profession is that, a lawyer’s choice on being on the ‘right’ or the ‘wrong’ side depends directly or
indirectly on the moral intelligence of the lawyer especially in the case of criminal procedures.

To prove this, we must be looking at some of the most entertaining and yet philosophical
court room drama movies’ character(s) from four of the most critics appreciated Bollywood movies –
Pink (2016), Jolly LLB (2013), and Jolly LLB 2 (2017) and from the most accurate representation of
the real life court room - …And Justice for all (1979), i.e. The characters of Deepak Sehgal and
Prashant Mehra from Pink, Jagadish Tyagi aka Jolly and Advocate Rajpal from Jolly LLB, Jagadish
Mishra aka Jolly and Sachin Kantilal Mathur from Jolly LLB 2, and Arthur Kirkland and Frank
Bowers from …And Justice for all. If we look at what all these movies have in common, we actually
find multiple things and if we establish this commonality between the plots, we can find how emotion
can find its way into the assumption that the cinemas have made that the lawyers that are on the side
of justice choose to be on the way because they have a personal moral obligation to fulfil as a lawyer
and moreover as a human being.

Firstly, other than the fact that all of these characters are driven by emotion, the movies
establish for a fact that there are problems in the process of police investigation by minor mistakes,
false evidences and bribery.2 Thus creating an image in our minds that the Law itself is dependent on a

1 Qtd. in letter from the Birmingham jail

2
In Pink (2016), the police officer is proven in the court that the FIR filed on the girls was faulty and indicated
some amount of tampering. In Jolly LLB (2013) the driver was proven as an unreliable witness when proven to
be lying in the court and also about the police investigation including bribe and for threatening life of a witness.
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body which is impotent to provide honest and meaningful resources to fight the case and let us not
forget about the delay in the process of judgements and how the courts are adjourned without giving a
judgement in time. In other words, “Tarikh pe Tarikh… Tarikh pe Tarikh milti rahi hei, lekin insaaf
nahi mila my lord.”3 All these factors considered the lead character(s) thus has to fight against the
following – The opposition lawyer, tampered/ false evidences, judicial system which is inclined
towards delay thus leading to injustice. For this to happen and for the audience to buy the excuse that
the justice, at the end for a happy conclusion, is provided, the writers induce the sense of emotion and
honesty to the lead character. But if we compare it to reality, it is almost impossible for everything to
fall into place the way in which movies portray especially for an honest lawyer.

Secondly, the lawyer on the opposite path to that of the lead’s is always the one filled with
fame, or money, or both and it is their whole purpose of taking up the case, and if we notice, the
opposition is the always the one who is in a superior position in power than that of the one who is
fighting for justice.4 This in fact, is the most accurate portrayal of reality and the closest detail about
the ‘negative’ role of the lawyer, i.e. the rich need the lawyer’s experience and the lawyers need their
money. But however what isn’t accurate about the movies’ assumption is that the lawyer(s) in
question don’t really have a moral obligation for them to fulfil or that they simply ignore the subject
of morality or integrity, while in reality this might not make a lot of sense to the lawyers in real life
not only because it is their job to do so, but also the way courts and judicial systems work may
primarily be based on ethics but entirely dependent rationale to anything and morality itself is very
subjective to legal professionals.

“A Lawyer will do anything to win a case, sometimes he will even tell the truth.” 5
The question of honesty in the court of justice is very crucial although tough to be proven, so hence
the lawyers opt to reason out the question of innocence or the question of guilty being proven and
then conclude the honesty of their client. This brings us to the third point of commonality in these
films, which is that the lawyers in this film are constantly trying to prove that their client’s not guilty
by proving that they are being honest or to prove that opposition’s client is guilty by proving that they
are being honest.6

3 Sunny Deol, Dilip Shukla, Rajkumar Santoshi et al. 1993. Damini. Ultra, DVD.

4 Judge Henry T. Fleming, from the movie … And Justice for all, is the one who is on a superior position of
political power compared to that of the rape victim Leah Shepard, similarly the Boys, from the movie Pink, are
politically powerful than that of the girl’s, and the victims of the road accident and false encounter are in a
position inferior to the parties involved in the accident and the police in terms of political power and financial
power.

5 Patrick Murray Quotes. BrainyQuote.com, BrainyMedia Inc, 2019.

https://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/patrick_murray_128847, accessed April 15, 2019.
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To Conclude, The Judge’s verdict is somehow predictable given that

6 Deepak Sehgal and the opposition (played by Amitabh Bachchan) from Pink is constantly trying to prove that
their clients are being honest or that the opposition is lying in the court of justice. Arthur Kirkland states in his
opening statement as the defence counsellor of the trail on Judge Henry T. Fleming being accused of rape that
“Justice is, as any reasonable man would tell you, finding of the truth.”