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| Welcome to Writing Lab |
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HOW TO CITE IDEAS EXERCISE
Now try your own hand at citing an idea you got from another source. You may use the following source paragraph or one suggested by your professor. Please also include a properly formatted entry for a list of Works Cited.
In the following passage taken from page 93 of the essay "P.C., O.J., and Truth," Susan Bordo discusses the OJ Simpson trial. This essay is included in her collection Twilight Zones: The Hidden Life of Cultural Images from Plato to O.J. published by the University of California Press in Berkeley in 1997.
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The legitimate role of defense lawyers is to create reasonable doubt in the minds of jurors, that is, to lead them to the point where after they have sifted through all the evidence, they will have reason to doubt the proof of guilt presented by the prosecution. Nowadays, I would argue what they try to do instead is to create a world of hyperbolic doubt in which nothing can be trusted because "everything is possible," leaving jurors unable to sift and weigh what is reasonable to believe and what is sheer speculation or fantasy. Like Descartes, jurors are led into a world of far-fetched hypotheses and dizzying doubt; unlike Descartes, however, they are not shown the path back to reason. That would be counterproductive to the lawyer's goal of getting the client off. Lawyers are aided and abetted in their efforts by the epistemological susceptibilities of contemporary juries. A friend of mine asked a student in his class if she would be willing to assert, if she were on a jury, that it is beyond reasonable
doubt that the earth rotates on its own axis and revolves around the sun; she said no. When he asked her why not, she said she didn't know. Descartes' evil genius is at work here, clearly.
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