There are essentially two planks on which the stories in Guilty Minds unfold:
The first of these planks wades into the lives that litigators lead outside the courtroom and into the emotional and personal worlds they each inhabit. All of us in everyday law practice will sigh wistfully at the amount and frequency of time off the protagonists are able to afford, if the pub scenes are any indication. And the show seems sadly to have missed that compelling and emotionally rich moments abound in working the law and in living with it, from the highs of wresting a difficult case from the jaws of dismissal to the certain compassion fatigue that committed rights litigators must feel.
The second plank relates to the stories told and tested in the courtroom. Here, episodes alternately treat issues that are perennially in the courts (like litigating rape in superior-subordinate relationships in the workplace, seeking justice for encounter killings in disturbed regions, or finding the right balance between economic growth and the attendant environmental impacts) and cases that are on the horizon with the rise and rise of digital and networked technologies (like copyright as it bears on an algorithm that samples existing songs to make new ones, the attribution of liabilities in accidents involving self-driving cars and the uneasiness in affixing criminal liability for the very real consequences of virtual reality gaming).
Of the latter category of cases, it can safely be said that the writing succeeds in its substance. So much of the policy and academic writing about issues concerning emerging technologies begins at and limits itself to a recitation of the developments in other jurisdictions. How refreshing, then, to find – within the confines of a fictional work intended for a lay audience – the spirit to do more! In Guilty Minds, there is a willingness to do the work to reason about these cases within the bounds of the Indian laws as we have them (the music algorithm episode), to attend to the facts, both to explain them (the dating site chatbot episode) and to apply them (the driverless cars episode), and to show how that staple of thinking about legal problems – reasoning by analogy – is called upon in our work (the virtual reality gaming episode).
Source: Barandbench
