Law’s Alien Tongue – Legal Translation, Religious Belief, and the Exorcism of Emily Rose

The Exorcism of Emily Rose (2005) puts a familiar legal question in an unusual setting: what can a criminal court do when the accused explains a death through a religious account that the court cannot verify as fact? The film is loosely modelled on the 1978 German prosecution that followed the death of Anneliese Michel after a series of exorcism rites. The historical case and the film are different legal events. The German proceedings arose within a statutory criminal-law system that could impose liability for an omission where the accused had a legal duty to prevent the result. The film instead presents a fictional American courtroom and stages a conflict between medical testimony, religious belief and the jury’s task of deciding criminal responsibility. This article reads both proceedings as exercises in legal translation. Law does not need to decide whether demonic possession exists to decide whether a defendant caused a death, had a duty to intervene, and met the standard of care that criminal law requires. Niklas Luhmann’s account of operational closure explains why religious claims are processed through legal categories and not admitted on their own terms. Miranda Fricker’s account of epistemic injustice is limited by the fact that not every exclusion of a supernatural explanation is necessarily a testimony injustice. The article also discusses the film’s expert witnesses and its exorcism tape, which serve as examples of how cinema can undermine the courtroom’s preferred forms of knowledge. The final section makes a limited comparison with neuroscience. In both contexts, external explanations can press on legal concepts of responsibility. However, the analogy has strict limits, because neuroscientific evidence is scientific in a way that a claim of supernatural causation is not.