The Holdout

by Graham Moore

“It’s your choice,” Craig said. Which was something people only said when it wasn’t. “You’re free to do whatever you like.” Which was something people only said when you weren’t. “The firm is with you.”

There wasn’t a cause in this world so pure that someone couldn’t figure out how to make it profitable.

Being innocent often made it harder to construct a good defense. Innocent people always wanted to shout out what really happened from the rooftops—but sometimes the best defense, legally speaking, wasn’t the truth.

But the verdicts had nothing to do with truth. No verdict ever changed a person’s opinion. Juries weren’t gods. The people who went into those courtrooms looking for divine revelation came out bearing the fruits of bureaucratic negotiation.

She wanted to say that the only thing worse than being wrong was having a bottomless need to prove that you never were.

You had to really care about someone to fight with them this hard. You had to deeply care about someone’s opinion to be this offended by how totally wrong they were.