ANATOMY OF A SCANDAL by Sarah Vaughan

“But hang around any court for a while and you will see just how precarious life can be.
How your world can come tumbling down all too rapidly if you make the wrong call.
If, just for one, fatal split second, you behave unlawfully.
Or rather, if you are poor and you break the law.

Courts, like hospitals, are magnets for those dealt a wrong hand from the start of life, who choose the wrong men or the wrong mates and become so mired in bad fortune they loose their moral compass.
The rich aren’t quite as affected.
Look at tax avoidance, or fraud, as it might be called perpetrated by someone without the benefit of a skilled accountant.
Bad luck or lack of acumen doesn’t seem to dog the rich quite as assiduously as the poor.”

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“I went into the law with high ideals, and I have retained some. I haven’t become overly jaded, but I hadn’t expected the need to win to be so brutally exposed.

The truth is a tricky issue. Rightly or wrongly, adversarial advocacy is not really an inquiry into the truth.
Advocacy is about being more persuasive than your opponent.
You can win, even if the evidence is stacked against you, provided that you argue better.
And it’s all about winning, of course.”

Kindle, 2022