The Runaway Jury

Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of illness, death, addiction, and substance use.

“The face of Nicholas Easter was slightly hidden by a display rack filled with slim cordless phones, and he was looking not directly at the hidden camera but somewhere off to the left, perhaps at a customer, or perhaps at a counter where a group of kids hovered over the latest electronic games from Asia.”

The opening lines of The Runaway Jury quickly introduce both Nicholas and the jury consultation process. It begins the novel in medias res, meaning in the middle of the action, as the jury consultants evaluate Nicholas for the trial.

“Each of the four, the Big Four as they were known in financial circles, could easily trace its roots to nineteenth-century tobacco brokers in the Carolinas and Virginia.”

Grisham connects the modern tobacco companies to the older tobacco brokers who historically utilized enslaved labor and then sharecropping to obtain their crops. In making this historical connection, Grisham links the unsavory business practices of modern tobacco companies with the atrocities through which those companies established themselves in the past.

“There were a hundred million smokers out there, not all with lung cancer but certainly a sufficient number to keep him busy until retirement. Win the first one, then sit back and wait for the stampede. Every main street ham-and-egger with a grieving widow would be calling with lung cancer cases. Rohr and his group could pick and choose.”

Grisham establishes the theme of The Moral Ambiguity of Litigation by illustrating that Rohr and his team are not representing Celeste Wood out of the goodness of their hearts. They want to profit off representing the victims of lung cancer and their loved ones, just as Fitch and defense attorney Durr Cable profit from representing the tobacco companies.