Adjudication, Neutrality, and the Jurisprudence of Imagination

[By Rohit Rohilla, Faculty and Mentor, LiveLaw Academy]

A brief moment in popular culture often captures with unusual clarity what jurisprudence has spent centuries attempting to explain: how judges decide cases, what neutrality means, and whether law can ever be detached from social life.

In A Time to Kill (a 1996 American legal drama film based on John Grisham’s 1989 novel of the same name), the defence closes with a single sentence:

“Now imagine she’s white.”

The sentence is not significant only for its cinematic impact. Its significance also lies elsewhere. It functions as a jurisprudential prompt, forcing attention to the foundational problem of adjudication: the relationship between legal reasoning and the social consciousness of the decision-maker.

The scene, read jurisprudentially, becomes a lens through which to examine the limits of formal neutrality, the role of imagination in judgment, and the inevitability of moral perception beneath doctrinal form.

Neutrality and the Formalist Ideal

The dominant self-description of modern adjudication is one of neutrality. Courts present themselves as institutions of reason, applying rules impersonally to facts. This ideal reflects the formalist conception of law: that legal outcomes can be derived through logical application of valid norms, without recourse to subjective evaluation.

Legal formalism treats law as a closed system, capable of deductive application much like mathematics. Under this view, judicial reasoning is primarily an exercise in classification: identifying the rule, locating the facts, and producing the conclusion.

Jurisprudence, however, has long questioned whether this account is sustainable. Ratnapala notes that legal formalism assumes that policy and moral considerations have no role once law is made, but that such a picture cannot survive serious examination of adjudicative practice.[i]

The aspiration to neutrality is institutionally necessary, but jurisprudentially incomplete.

The Realist Critique: Law as Decision, Not Rule

The realist tradition begins with a simple observation: adjudication cannot be reduced to rule-application.

Rules are indeterminate. Language has what Hart described as an “open texture.” Legal terms inevitably contain penumbras of uncertainty. No legislature can foresee all factual circumstances, and no rule can exhaustively determine its own application. This linguistic and factual indeterminacy creates spaces where judicial discretion becomes decisive.[ii]

From this perspective, adjudication is not merely the discovery of law, but the production of law through decision. Holmes’ famous formulation that law is ultimately a prophecy of what courts will do reflects precisely this realist shift.

The closing line in A Time to Kill is jurisprudentially revealing because it exposes that adjudication is never only about what the rule says, but about how the decision-maker understands the social meaning of the facts.

Adjudication and the Problem of Perspective

The jurisprudential problem is not simply that judges have discretion. It is that discretion is exercised through perception, and perception is socially situated.

The sentence “Now imagine she’s white” alters no legal rule. It alters only the interpretive frame through which harm is perceived. It demonstrates that legal judgment is filtered through background assumptions about whose suffering is intelligible, whose credibility is presumed, and whose violence is morally legible.

This resonates with sociological jurisprudence, which rejects the idea that law is separable from the social order. The sociological tradition demonstrated the inseparability of legal order from social order: there is no law without society, and no society without law.[iii]

Adjudication, therefore, is not an abstract process occurring above society. It is one of the ways society interprets itself through institutional form.

The “Norms of Decision” Beyond the Law in Books

A further jurisprudential insight comes from Ehrlich’s distinction between “law in books” and the “living law.”

Legal norms exist not only in statutes and precedents, but in the social practices and expectations that precede official recognition. When disputes reach courts, judges do not apply rules in isolation; they apply what Ehrlich called “norms of decision,” which inevitably include moral and policy considerations.[iv]

The defence summation in A Time to Kill is an illustration of this jurisprudential reality. It does not introduce new law. It seeks to reshape the norm of decision by compelling the adjudicator to confront the social meaning of the harm.

The line functions as a reminder that adjudication is never merely technical; it is interpretive, and interpretation is socially embedded.

Imagination as a Condition of Legal Judgment

Judicial reasoning depends fundamentally on imagination.

Courts constantly invoke constructs such as:

1. the reasonable person
2. ordinary human conduct
3. proportionality
4. shock to conscience

These are not empirical facts. They are interpretive judgments about social life.

The jurisprudential question is not whether imagination enters adjudication, but how it is structured. The line “Now imagine she’s white” demonstrates that imagination is often selective: some experiences are easily universalised, while others remain marginal.

This exposes the fragility of neutrality. Neutrality is not achieved by absence of perspective, but by awareness of perspective.

Law, Morality, and the Conditions of Fidelity

The scene also implicates the deeper jurisprudential debate on law and morality.

Positivist traditions insist that legal validity does not depend on moral content. Law is law if recognised through the rule of recognition, even if unjust.[v]

Yet Fuller’s response is that law cannot be sustained purely as valid form. Its authority depends on fidelity, reciprocity, and the moral attitudes of the community. A legal system that departs too far from the morality of order risks ceasing to function as law in anything more than a Pickwickian sense.[vi]

The defence’s closing line operates precisely at this junction: it appeals not to doctrine, but to the moral psychology through which doctrine acquires legitimacy. 

Jurisprudence begins where doctrinal certainty ends: in the interrogation of law’s foundations, its methods, and its silences.

A single line in a courtroom drama becomes jurisprudentially instructive because it reveals what legal systems often deny: adjudication is not a view from nowhere. It is a practice of judgment carried out by situated agents within a structured social world.

To study such moments is not to depart from jurisprudence. It is to return to its central question:

What does it mean for law to claim justice, when judgment is inseparable from human perspective?

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[i] Ratnapala S, Jurisprudence (Cambridge University Press 2009) 94-95. (explaining legal formalism as treating law as a closed system applied deductively, excluding policy considerations after law is made)

[ii] ibid 95-96

[iii] ibid 211

[iv] ibid 14

[v] ibid 54-55. (outlining Hart’s separation thesis and the positivist claim that a law’s validity depends on recognition, not moral merit)

[vi] ibid 167-168. (discussing Fuller’s argument that a dictatorship clothed in legal form may cease to be a legal system except in the ‘Pickwickian’ sense)