Goofs

During his defense of the accused in the courtroom, the way he presented the pebbles to the jury differed between the scenes from the front and over shoulders.

While Marshall was at the bar with his friends drinking and smoking, the length of the cigarettes in their hands changed between scenes.

In the early 1940s, Marshall gives Friedman, whose experience is in civil law, books to get him up to speed on criminal law. However, none of the books focus on criminal law. The first, A Concise Restatement of Torts, Second Edition, about civil law, was published in 1965. The two volumes of Wigmore on Evidence are the McNaughton Revision, published in 1961. Evidentiary law discussed in Wigmore applies in both criminal and civil cases, so Friedman, a trial lawyer, would already be familiar with it. The fourth was Volume 308 of the United States Reports, which published all the US Supreme Court opinions for the 1939 October term.

After services at Temple Rodeph Shalom, the congregants, including Sam Friedman and his family, depart for home. The actual name of that synagogue, then and now, is Congregation Rodeph Shalom. It has always been a Conservative synagogue, and "Temple" has never been part of its name.

At the end of the movie, Marshall drops some coins into a pay phone in Mississippi to call Friedman in Connecticut to find out the verdict in the case. He would've had to call the operator, who would've called a hub, which would have established a trunk line to New York City, and so on. Making that long-distance call could take all day.

When Sam and Thurgood are walking up the steps of the courthouse, and people are holding signs, modern cars and road cones where traffic is being routed are visible in the upper left corner, past Thurgood.

When Stella tells Sam that her cousin Anna in Krakow has been rounded up by the Nazis, he asks her in Yiddish whether Anna's children were also taken. The subtitle says that he's speaking in Hebrew.