It was written as a parody of the fairly corrupt Japanese legal system, exaggerated for both humour and gameplay reasons, giving us such lovely gems as:

• They don't have manslaughter
• It's never stated outright to my knowledge, but it's generally implied that the penalty for murder is universally or near-universally the death penalty
• Trials are legally mandated to go on no longer than three days, no matter how complicated they can get. The lab analysis for a poison isn't completed in three days? You can't use it in the poisoning trial. Your witness can't be tracked down on the last day? We go to the verdict without their testimony.
• Everyone is assumed guilty until proven innocent. The defense attorney has to prove beyond a reasonable doubt, within 3 days, that their client could not possibly be guilty, or they're gonna get a GUILTY verdict
• In practical terms, this means that if your client is innocent, you have to not only prove that but usually find the actual killer within the three days to show it's a different person. This isn't officially mandated as part of the defense's duties but in pretty much every case it's what Phoenix has to do to exonerate his client, even if he's otherwise proven the killer couldn't be (or is extremely unlikely to be) his client.
• Both sides can just show up to the courtroom with new evidence and demand it's accepted as evidence during the trial. There's no verification process for this and no requirement that the other side has access to it pre-trial. You can show up with a letter in hand and halfway through the trial be like "this letter was found in the victim's apartment!" and it becomes part of the case then and there.
• There are no restrictions on where or how you can find evidence. You, a defense attorney who doesn't work for the police force and has no equivalent of warrant law, can break into a witness' house and steal evidence from his personal safe to show in court the next day. This is not a crime apparently.
• It's normal and accepted that the prosecution will coach all witnesses, usually telling them to lie. It's a huge advantage when you get to interrogate a witness who the prosecution hasn't been able to tell what lies to tell yet. They never face repercussions for this.
• The prosecution will frequently falsify evidence. They receive no punishment for this and are allowed to continue practicing law. Witnesses will regularly lie on the stand; they receive no penalty for this and the rest of their testimony is still considered reliable. It's up to the defense attorney to expose every single lie; if you can't prove a word against your client is a lie, even from the mouth of a known liar, then your client must be guilty of it.
• All of your trials are overseen by the same judge and he is comically incompetent. This isn't an oversight of the game he is deliberately written to suck at his job, be easily bullied by the prosecution, generally have very little idea what's going on and issue his verdict based on Vibes.
• The lawyers will straight up make bets mid-trial with each other like "if you can't find a problem with this next witness' testimony, you have to admit that you're wasting our time and the verdict will be Guilty". The judge lets them do this. This is considered practicing law. Prosecutors will also physically assault other lawyers and the judge in the courtroom but this is okay because it's funny.
• The cops work directly for the prosecuting attorney and the prosecuting attorney will openly threaten police witnesses right there on the stand in front of everyone if the witness isn't saying what the prosecution wants them to.
• The level of corruption in the prosecutor's office is just. I couldn't describe it in a bullet point. Prosecutors are straightup hitmen for hire and their weapon of choice is the death penalty.
• Phoenix gets physically assaulted and robbed by prosecutors and witnesses a lot more than one would reasonably expect. Someone's always there to beat this poor lawyer unconscious and steal evidence from him. He never makes backup copies. That's not the legal system's fault but dude buy a photocopier for your office.

Guess who's about to get tased and robbed in the police precinct evidence room by a highly respected and successful prosecutor!

Guess who didn't make photocopies of the evidence that's about to get stolen!

Wait wait lemme add some things

• Prosecutors have full access to crime scenes and it is implied that they lead the police investigations
• Defense attorneys are not supposed to engage with the crime scene or investigate at all! (Hence why phoenix has to worm his way in or break into crime scenes to get evidence)
• It is expected that all evidence AND witnesses come from the prosecution. The fact that Phoenix brings in his own evidence and witnesses is *weird*
• It is implied that not only do trials have to end in three days, but if a trial lasts that long everyone is very confused and miffed about it. The judge was very torn about having to go a second day on one trial bc he made dinner plans
• False evidence is solved by "whoops, I'm sorry, I didn't know" on the side of the prosecution.
• False evidence from the defense can result in the attorney being disbarred even if the false evidence came from the prosecution in the first place
• There is a game where defense attorneys literally get the same sentence as their defendant (put to death) and thats why [insert place here] has no lawyers anymore
• Apparently the defense is allowed to have random citizens join them at the bench as legal advisers. These legal advisers happen to sometimes be an 8 year old

me the first time i saw this: oh sure that's fun ig

me seeing it again now: fuuuuuuuuck yes the axolotl is back

My students literally request this song regularly.

Yep.

https://drmaciver.substack.com/p/how-to-do-everything had a nice list of additional examples like this, with (non-)obvious major insights with regard to opening stitched bags, cleaning your bathroom floor, using a search engine, catching a ball, pinging somebody, proving a theorem, playing sudoku, passing as “normal”, improving your writing, generating novel ideas, and solving your problem.

If you’d asked me six months ago how to get better at something, I’d probably have pointed you to how to do hard things. I still think this is a good approach and you should do it, but I now think it’s the wrong starting point and I’ve been undervaluing small insights. [...]

I think my revised belief is that if you are stuck at how to get better at something, spend a little while assuming there’s just some trick to it you’ve missed. You can try to generate the trick yourself, but it’s probably easier to learn it by observing someone else being good at the thing, asking them some questions, and seeing if you have any lightbulb moment.

My fiance played the clarinet when he was in school. When he was first learning to play, he rented an instrument from the school to learn on. He was the last chair clarinet, had been for years, because he could not make notes that required the register key. For years, they kept making him do embrature exercises and he started to get a few notes, with lots of effort. Eventually he had to get private lessons to stay in band.

Every time he tells me this story, his frustration by this point in the story, years later, is evident. He still sounds frustrated by it, despite all the time that passed. Teachers had been giving him crap for years because he hadn't been making much progress with the instrument.

When he got to the private instructor, she acknowledged his frustration, and asked him to try to play for her. He did, and she saw all he was doing. She then did something no one else had done before. She asked him to put his mouthpiece on a different clarinet and try to play the same notes. Like magic, it worked. She looked at the clarinet he had been using and found that the school's clarinet needed it's pads replaced.

He went from last chair to first chair nearly overnight, having been taught far more techniques than typically taught at that age just to overcome the broken instrument preventing him from making noise.

Sometimes you don't need to brute force a problem. Sometimes your clarinet is just broken.

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