A Civil Action (Woburn chemical spill)
Appears in 1 lecture.
Appearances across the corpus
Tom invokes the Duvall/Travolta exchange to make his point that legal advocacy displaces truth-seeking. Used as a rhetorical frame for the MMT ethics narrative.
One of my favorite quotes comes from a movie called A Civil Action, where Robert Duvall is the defense attorney — this is about a chemical spill up in Woburn, Massachusetts, it's a true story. Duvall has just offered John Travolta twenty million dollars to settle the case, and Travolta's turned him down. Duvall says, "What are you looking for?" Travolta says, "I'm looking for the truth." And Duvall's comment was absolutely true: "You quit looking for the truth the day you filed suit." The courtroom is not about truth. It's whose attorneys can put together the best story and pull the wool over the jury's eyes. We could talk about the whole impeachment proceedings that we've been watching, okay.