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A French Criminal Justice Expert Answers Our Questions About Anatomy of a Fall


The Best Picture-nominated drama is an only mostly realistic portrait of the funnily dressed, anything-goes nature of French courts.

And I wonder if people kind of have that impression because in North American and Wales, it’s an adversarial party-driven system, in which the two parties determine the contours of the case and the judge has this much more umpire-type role. France’s is an inquisitorial system, because the model is of a single inquiry into the truth, rather than two parties presenting opposing versions for the judge to then decide which is correct. He does this unsupervised experiment on Snoop ( Palm Dog winner Messi) and gets to give this very moving monologue about a memory of his dad, without any real guardrails on his testimony.

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