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© Nathaniel Burney. All rights reserved, though they really open up once you get to know them.
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I do want to say “thank you” for this comic series.
Typically, I find a lot of police procedural fictions and courtroom dramas to be utterly boring and way too formulaic, always hitting the same beats, and the stories itself get way too predictable. And even someone with less than a layman’s knowledge of law can watch the end of Paul Newman’s “The Verdict” and realize that the whole case will be thrown out (since, well, the sum total of the defense’s evidence was deemed inadmissible, then the jury sided with the defense, mostly because they /heard/ the evidence).
That being said, it’s nice to have a “paint-by-numbers” guide to law and procedure. Hopefully I won’t need any of this information in any real-world situation. As a writer, however, this ought to give me some tools that, should the question of law arise, I can at least attempt to make things sound feasible.
Glad it helps! Although I try to cover the same stuff you’d learn in law school (tempered with a strong dose of real life), I’m making a concerted effort to not mention specific cases. Apart from the fact that few outside the legal profession actually care about case names (so why bother), I find it frees me from following the same-old-same-old.
What do you write? Anything I might have read?
Oh, anything from science fiction prose to comics to screenplays. As far as anything published on the other hand, well, that’s still something in the future.
I also would love to use this in my writing- I create adventures for the roleplaying game Dungeons & Dragons. I’m currently working on a medieval setting, and this has been very useful in establishing the laws of the region (when your players regularly ask if it’s OK to kill the mayor and take his gold, it’s important to know the actual rules of your own city).
I would also like to render thanks, now that I find such is a socially acceptable use for this forum. This comic has proven very useful in competitive (high school) debate; I have added it to the wishlist for items to be included in my team’s debate prep box, mostly because it seems the only way I’ll be able to shove knowledge down their throats. Have a nice day.
Thanks!
(And I owe it to my publisher to mention that you can also get this in handy book form, 340 pages of justicey goodness, only $24.95!)
Now that, there, is persuasion. Feel free to use this master technique on your debate opponents, and watch them cave.
While we are doing a thanks-fest, I think I might as well take a turn. I’m not really creative, but I learned a lot from your comic! I’m an advocate of lgbt rights so your section on the purpose of criminal law and pointing out to me that modern philosophy on criminal law asks the question of what harms the state really helped me deal with a lot of slippery-slope fallacies. Now I realize that criminal law and civil law aren’t the same thing, but still, I appreciate this starting point.