Tarlton Law Library - Law in Popular Culture Collection - E-texts
The University of Texas at Austin
Legal Studies Forum 431 
Volume 23, Number 4 (1999)

In Ayn Rand’s fiction trials play a prominent a role. Her novels comprise battles between good and evil. But the confrontations are not the physical contests of pulp fiction. The battles are essentially intellectual. And the modern battlefield for intellectual contests of this sort is the courtroom. The adversarial system of justice provides a near perfect metaphor for the intellectual contest between good and evil. 

The differences between the trials, however, suggest that the good is not self-evident and that once identified it does not inevitably prevail. It requires rational argument. But, as the novel itself demonstrates, abstract argument is much more likely to be appreciated in the context of particular events. Unquestionably Rand’s position is both more understandable and more persuasive for being explicated not merely through a philosophical treatise, but through the events of a story with the philosophical discourse integrated into that story. In short, the integration of the abstract and the particular is what provides the power of Rand’s argument.

And this is precisely what happens in the typical judicial opinion, though typically on a less grand scale involving more mundane matters.

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