"It takes a long time to learn that a courtroom is the last place in the world for learning the truth"
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Koller’s line lands like a civic disappointment you can’t quite shake: the institution marketed as society’s truth machine is, by design, bad at truth. The blunt phrasing “a long time to learn” does two things at once. It admits the seduction of the myth (most of us grow up believing courts exist to “find out what happened”) and it implicates experience as the teacher that strips that belief away. You don’t arrive at this insight from a textbook; you arrive after watching how the system actually moves.
The subtext is less “courts are corrupt” than “courts have different incentives.” A courtroom is an arena where stories are strategically narrowed, timed, and packaged. Rules of evidence don’t ask, “What’s real?” so much as “What can be proven, by whom, under what constraints?” Lawyers are trained to win within a framework, not to wander openly toward understanding. Witnesses are coached, memories are sliced into admissible fragments, and the messiness of lived experience gets flattened into yes-or-no answers. Even the language of “facts” becomes adversarial property.
Calling it “the last place” is hyperbole with purpose: it’s a corrective to naive faith in procedural theater. Koller is pointing at the gap between moral truth and legal truth, between what happened and what can be established beyond a reasonable doubt, within deadlines, budgets, and human bias. The line reads like it comes from someone who has watched stakes get translated into paperwork and felt the psychic whiplash of realizing that justice and truth are only occasionally aligned.
The subtext is less “courts are corrupt” than “courts have different incentives.” A courtroom is an arena where stories are strategically narrowed, timed, and packaged. Rules of evidence don’t ask, “What’s real?” so much as “What can be proven, by whom, under what constraints?” Lawyers are trained to win within a framework, not to wander openly toward understanding. Witnesses are coached, memories are sliced into admissible fragments, and the messiness of lived experience gets flattened into yes-or-no answers. Even the language of “facts” becomes adversarial property.
Calling it “the last place” is hyperbole with purpose: it’s a corrective to naive faith in procedural theater. Koller is pointing at the gap between moral truth and legal truth, between what happened and what can be established beyond a reasonable doubt, within deadlines, budgets, and human bias. The line reads like it comes from someone who has watched stakes get translated into paperwork and felt the psychic whiplash of realizing that justice and truth are only occasionally aligned.
Quote Details
| Topic | Justice |
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