Truth, in law and in life, is rarely singular, writes Rebecca Ward, MBA.
If you’ve ever seen the famous optical illusion of the duck and the rabbit, you’ll understand the daily reality of a courtroom. Two people look at the same picture: one swears it’s a duck, the other insists it’s a rabbit. Both are right. Both are wrong. And the drawing itself never changes.
Law is built on this paradox. Every trial is an exercise in perspective. The prosecution points to the image and says “duck”; the defence points and says “rabbit.” They are describing the same lines, the same shading, the same contours of fact. What differs is interpretation. The truth does not sit in either argument but somewhere between them, flickering in and out of focus as the viewer’s mind shifts.
Seeing and believing
The duck–rabbit illusion is a perfect metaphor for evidence. Evidence, like the drawing, does not speak. It waits. What gives it meaning is the mind that observes it. In courtrooms, we like to imagine that facts are neutral, but even facts are curated, presented, and framed by human beings with different histories and biases.
Some forms of evidence appear more solid than others. A video recording or CCTV footage seems to offer certainty. Yet even there, the lens angle, lighting, and context change what we think we see. Move down the scale and the picture blurs further: witness recollection, interpretation, even memory itself. Memory is not a photograph; it’s a story we edit each time we tell it.
Lawyers know this instinctively. One witness says, “I saw a duck.” Another says, “No, it was a rabbit.” Cross-examination becomes an exercise in anatomy, trying to determine whether the beak was long enough to be ears or the ears short enough to be a beak. Both witnesses may be sincere. Each is describing the truth as they experienced it.
The adversarial lens
The beauty and burden of the adversarial system is that it relies on contradiction to approximate truth. Prosecution and defence are not moral opposites; they are complementary forces testing the strength of each other’s perception. The aim is not to prove one image exists and the other doesn’t, but to reveal how fragile certainty can be.
In this way, the duck–rabbit drawing becomes a map of justice itself. The adversarial process is the act of turning the page, tilting the image, asking: “Could it also be something else?” Judges and jurors must hold both pictures in mind at once, the discipline of doubt.
Yet we often grow impatient with ambiguity. We want to know, definitively, who is right and who is wrong. Certainty feels safe. But as every experienced advocate or therapist knows, certainty can be misleading. It freezes inquiry at the moment it becomes most interesting.
The psychology of perception
Psychology reminds us that perception is constructed, not captured. We see what we expect to see. We find what we’re trained to find. An orthopaedic surgeon looks at a person and sees bone density; a psychologist sees attachment patterns; a barrister sees credibility and motive. The object hasn’t changed, only the observer has.
Context shapes everything. What we had for breakfast, the headlines we skimmed, the cases we’ve won or lost, all of it primes us. The next time you read a witness statement, imagine the invisible variables: fatigue, fear, culture, power dynamics, and memory decay. Even our choice of words acts as a lens. “Victim,” “offender,” “witness”, each carries an implied expectation.
This is why evidence must be tested, not merely presented. The testing process doesn’t destroy truth; it protects it from our own distortions.
When evidence becomes a story
Every piece of evidence lives two lives: the one it had and the one it takes on in retelling. Between them lies narrative. The human brain cannot resist turning information into a story. We impose beginnings, middles, and ends. We assign heroes, villains, and motives. In that process, evidence becomes theatre.
Stories are seductive because they make us feel as though we understand. A juror might find a coherent story more believable than a messy fact. A lawyer might shape closing submissions to fit a moral arc rather than a probabilistic one. The danger is that we start prosecuting the story instead of analysing the evidence.
The discipline of justice is learning to hold narrative lightly, to see the duck and the rabbit simultaneously, resisting the urge to declare one truer than the other.
The discipline of doubt
Justice depends on humility: the willingness to be uncertain. The duck–rabbit teaches that perception is fluid, that evidence is inert until someone interprets it, and that two honest people can see opposing truths without either being dishonest.
Lawyers live inside this illusion every day. Cross-examination, submission, and verdict are all attempts to freeze a moving picture long enough to make sense of it. But the picture keeps shifting because people do. Witnesses forget, experts disagree, judges reinterpret precedent. What remains constant is the drawing itself, the evidence, waiting for eyes patient enough to see its complexity.
Truth, in law and in life, is rarely singular. It lives in the tension between competing interpretations, in the space where two people look at the same picture and see different things, and both are telling the truth as they understand it.
Rebecca Ward is an MBA-qualified management consultant with a focus on mental health. She is the managing director of Barristers’ Health, which supports the legal profession through management consulting and psychotherapy. Barristers’ Health was founded in memory of her brother, Steven Ward, LLB.
