Free Storytelling for Lawyers by Philip Meyer

machine, ordered, legalistic, rational, yet utterly out of human control, wholly and perfectly indifferent to any human value.” 35 Like the shark in
Jaws
, whose appetite is whetted initially by the taste of blood, Spence’s Kerr-McGee growsever bolder and darker and more powerful as his story progresses: the corporation becomes progressively more venal, greedy, and devouring, preferring these profits over the lives of its workers and then finally, Spence intimates, intentionally undertaking or at least encouraging the murder of Silkwood (although Spence tells the jury that he is not allowed to speculate on this matter).
    At the end of his rebuttal argument, Spence suggests that allowing Kerr-McGee to go unpunished and unrepentant will result in far more than simply unfairness and injustice to Silkwood. If Kerr-McGee is not stopped, Spence visualizes in his final dream sequence a dark vision of corporatist tyranny throughout the land and the destruction of endless young lives by plutonium poisoning and cancer. The filmmaker and literary theorist Michael Roemer observes:
    Popular story shows us as we are supposed to be and wish to see ourselves. Like the community itself, it represses what tragedy includes. By projecting evil onto the other, it purges us of our dark and dirty secrets, frees us up from self-division, and fosters
communitas
by giving us someone to hate and fear. Yet
unlike
Positivism, it retains its belief in the power of evil. Indeed, without a destructive threat—whether it be divine or human—there is no story. 36
    Here, for example, is how Spence initially attributes the ability to “speak the language of money” to the corporate defendant Kerr-McGee in his closing argument:
    You know, I was amazed to hear that Kerr-McGee has eleven thousand employees—eleven thousand employees. That’s more than most of the towns in the state that I live in—that it is in thirty-five states—well, I guarantee that corporation does not speak “South,” it doesn’t speak “Okie,” it doesn’t speak “Western,” it doesn’t speak “New York.” And it is in five states—or in five countries. It doesn’t speak any foreign language. It speaks one language universally. It speaks the language of money. That is the only language that it speaks—the only language that it understands—and that is why the case becomes what it is. That’s why we have to talk back to that corporation in money. 37
    Of course, it is then crucial for the jury to speak in the language that the defendant understands, and in such a forceful way that the corporation willchange its behavior. Subsequently, Spence zigzags back to his legal theory of punitive damages, as if a law professor speaking to first-year students, providing a simplified understanding of utilitarian and retributionist rationales for such punishment:
    I want to quote an instruction that you will hear. It is the basis of punitive damages—that’s the $70 million to punish. Punitive. To exemplify. Exemplary. So that the rest of the uranium plutonium, and the nuclear industries in this country, will have to tell the truth. The basis of punitive and exemplary damages rests on the principle that they are allowed as punishment of the offender for the general benefit of society, both as a restraint upon the transgressor—restraint upon the transgressor—that is, against Kerr-McGee, so they won’t do it anymore, and a meaningful warning and example—to deter the commission of like offenses in the future. 38
F. “The Setup”: The Villainous Outlaw Gang versus the Townspeople
    Spence carefully, but selectively, revisits crucial excerpts of the testimony of the various witnesses. The witnesses are divided into two oppositional groups: there are the defendant’s witnesses—agents of the evil corporation, subsumed by the will of the greedy and devouring corporate