Lawyer and Novelist Joshua Perry Tells Why Storytelling Matters

Joshua Perry, former Connecticut Solicitor General, visited Yale Law School to discuss his new novel “Seraphim” (Melville House 2024) and the critical role that storytelling plays in law. The event, co-hosted by the Arthur Liman Center for Public Interest Law and Yale Law School Defenders on Oct. 17, was moderated by Liman Center Executive Director Kate Braner.

Perry and Braner each brought to the conversation decades of experience as public defenders and a first-hand understanding of the complexities of criminal defense. Perry spent nearly a decade in New Orleans as the head of the city’s youth public defender and general counsel to the Orleans Public Defenders. Before joining the Liman Center this year, Braner spent most of her career in the San Diego County Office of the Public Defender, most recently as interim public defender.

Perry described “Seraphim” as a story about loyalty and grief. Set against the backdrop of a post-Hurricane Katrina New Orleans, the novel explores the abuses of privilege, prejudice, and power within a broken legal system.

“I wrote this novel because I wanted to say some things about the work and the kids that I served that I couldn't say through nonfiction and that I found that I couldn't say without a filter of a narrator between myself and the audience,” he said.

Perry read a passage from the novel, in which the narrator, Ben Alder, reflects on storytelling in court:

“People like to have their questions answered, and the prosecutor is usually saying what jurors and judges want to believe. Trial lawyers don’t change the way people think. There’s no time for that if it were even possible. Instead, the thing is to flatter them, stand up, and tell them how it actually happened in a way they can hear. The trial theory accounts for bad facts in the case; it highlights every good fact. It panders to the jury’s biases about how the world works and answers all their big questions.”

That passage contains a “true, but controversial statement,” Braner said. 

“I think students who have not been in front of juries are a little bit shocked by the statement that a good lawyer ‘panders to the jury's biases,’” she added.

Perry continued with an example.

“How we talk about race, for instance, is a sensitive topic that comes up frequently in court,” he said. “There is a broad recognition today that race inflects every aspect of the justice system and corrupts many aspects of it. One of the important questions is recognizing that reality.”

Braner described how public defenders bear witness to suffering.

“You are inundated with trauma every day,” Braner said. “It is the trauma that our clients inflict on other people, but even more so, it is the trauma that has been inflicted on our clients. We have to understand all of those stories and use that information to help our clients the best we can.”

Perry discussed a challenge of being a public defender: always striving to understand what other people — your clients, witnesses, and victims — are experiencing and have experienced.

“The most important thing is to be aware of it and to think about it,” he said. “Part of the reason I wrote this book was to recognize the tension there and to try to address it within myself.”

The key part of the story is making the jurors recognize that they are the ones who can, the only ones who can, restore us to this place of happiness that was the status quo.”

— Joshua Perry

Perry emphasized the importance of framing narratives for jurors.

“The kinds of stories that we tell are much simpler and more archetypal when presented in front of jurors,” he said. “In large part because you do not have time to develop complexity. The key part of the story is making the jurors recognize that they are the ones who can, the only ones who can, restore us to this place of happiness that was the status quo.”

Perry discussed his commitments to his clients.

“My position always was that my kids are good kids,” he said. “It is how I started every conversation and ended every conversation. Sometimes, using those exact words literally, but always conveying that spirit. You try to be collegial when you can. That was rule number one. Rule number two was to be consistent. I needed to be the same person with the same values every day in court. My hope was that in many courtrooms and with many prosecutors, it helped.”

He concluded with a reflection.

“Storytelling is an effort to resolve uncertainty,” Perry said. “It is an effort to put together the things that we know, the things that we do not know, the things that are compelling, the things that are not compelling, into a narrative that makes sense, that helps people resolve the doubt that so few of us can live with in the world.”

Perry’s spouse, Anna VanCleave, Director of the Criminal Defense Clinic and Associate Professor of Law at the University of Connecticut School of Law, served as Director of the Liman Center from 2016 to 2021.