The First 20 Years of Law and Popular Culture - Essay Example

?Essay Question: How would you sum up the first 20 years of Law and Popular Culture as a focus for scholarship in Law Schools and beyond? Executive Summary: ‘Law and Popular Culture’ represents the social context in which the lawyer practices and the nature of popular opinion as it is related to the image of attorneys in media archetypes. The two examples of 'the activist lawyer' and 'the corrupt lawyer' are discussed in this essay with relations given in examples from cinema, television, and social history. The stereotypes of the two types of lawyer may often be portrayed in overly simplistic stories in mainstream mass-media, but represent the ethical problems experienced by lawyers every day in practice. Scholarship in “Law and Popular Culture’ uses this aspect of the discipline to educate attorneys in public awareness of the consequences of their actions. In critically evaluating the scholarship and impact of the last 20 years of “Law and Popular Culture” studies in Law Schools, the importance of image and appearance in constructing public opinion is made evident, as well as the popularity of legal themes in mainstream culture itself. Academic studies have drawn comparisons to the way media stereotypes of law and legal issues can frame public awareness of themes in ways that may be prejudicial to jury selection or point to biases that might influence juror opinions subliminally on technical legal issues of great importance. There has been an awareness of the importance of accuracy in legal representations in mass media, but also in the importance for lawyers to be aware of the social context when practicing law. In drawing legal issues through media stories in broad dualities, fictional programs such as film, video, television, and literary depictions represent the dynamic processes of law in the prosecutor and defence attorney. However, in painting the broader social context of these stories, and the personalities of the heroes and anti-heroes of law, thematic content can be noted to constellate around two primary archetypes as a fundamental division, 'the activist lawyer' and 'the corrupt lawyer'. As Richard Sherman writes in Symposium: Law and Popular Culture: Nomos and Cinema, “Law lives in images. We make sense of reality by drawing upon the stories and storytelling modes that are most familiar to us. And these days, television and film are by far the most popular sources of the stories and story forms that we all know. It should hardly prove surprising to find trial lawyers importing popular film stories and characters as well as familiar cinematic styles into their courtroom performances.”1 ‘Law and Popular Culture’ studies can draw upon groundbreaking work such as Joseph Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces and Masks Of God: Creative Mythologies to assist with the methodology of media interpretation through psychology. In understanding how the mind relates to ideas formed in popular culture through media, the assumption is that the unconscious and subconscious forces, emotions, and biases all act to build sentiment and identity in the individual as part of personal identity, as well as the more conscious and ego-driven goals. In pointing to the unconscious nature of crowd behaviour as it is reflected in public opinion in mass-media based societies in post-modernism, ‘Law and Popular Culture’ studies returns to its early roots and definitions, as posited by Lawrence Friedman in the 1980’s. For example, in Total Justice, written in 1985, Lawrence Friedman defines legal culture as "ideas, attitudes, values, and opinions about law held by a society.”2 However, he takes this definition further in Law, Lawyers, and Popular Culture, and essay published in the Yale law Journal in 1989. There he writes: "Legal culture refers to those ideas and attitudes which are specifically legal in content - ideas about courts, justice, the police, the Supreme Court, lawyers, and so on... the term popular culture, on the other hand, refers first, and more generally, to the norms and values held by ordinary people, or at any rate, by non-intellectuals, as opposed to high culture, the culture of intellectuals and the intelligentsia, or what Robert Gordon has called 'mandarin culture'. Second, and more narrowly, it refers to 'culture' in the sense of books, songs, movies, plays, television shows, and the like; but specifically to those works of imagination whose intended audience is the public as a whole, rather than the intelligentsia: Elvis rather than Marilyn Horne."3 If one compares the current state of ‘Law and Popular Culture’ studies in Law Schools today, and the academic research published in a field elevated and given respectability within the Legal Academy largely through Friedman’s work and research, it is evident that the paradigm has shifted greatly since the time of the essays. The internet, for example, has blurred further the borders between high and low culture. Few people speak of “Mandarin Culture” these days, and the intelligentsia Friedman writes about are likely as consumed in popular media as the “ordinary” people. Media studies has been a wide and expanding field during the last 20 years of it evolution, and academics have broadly established the theme that popular culture is representative of the main-stream American civil society. Furthermore, through the expansion of cable channels, there is a much greater diversity in programming available now than when Friedman was writing. Cinema and television are currently much more sophisticated in many ways that in the 1980’s, as directors, producers, and screenwriters have developed their work in reference to previous depictions and methods of film production. As Goodman writes, “It is impossible to tell whether law has gone pop or pop has gone law, but now it is clear that there is a crucial relation between the two.”4 Nevertheless, when lawyers are developed in public mass-media fiction, they are inevitably built as characters following the two media archetypes of 'the activist lawyer' and 'the corrupt lawyer'. What is interesting in this is how it follows the “good and bad” or “good and evil” duality, and in how society actually constructs the values in these instances. In predictably associating “good” with “activism” in law, law that produces social change and corrects injustices, fuelled by the “heart” energy, drive, and passion of the protagonists, the directors, screenwriters, producers, etc. construct a social portrait of what they collectively believe the moral path of law to be. When compared to how the same studios build the portrait of evil, it is inevitably as corrupt, interwoven with corporate interests, and serving profit over altruism in society. Law students can easily identify with these stereotypes and even base their careers on examples of legal practice as portrayed in the mass-media, an example of the Hyperreality written about by Jean Baudrillard in his theory of media interpretation. Whether in Erin Brokovich or Allie McBeal, Matlock, L.A. Law, or Perry Mason, the legal stereotypes of good and bad are painted in a similar manner because that is how they are viewed by the public at large popularly. Thus, ‘Law and Popular Culture’ studies use mass-media in a similar way that political analysts do in assessing public sentiment on issues, using fictional representations in media as a means to dowse public sentiment in a mass-democracy. “IT IS NOW WIDELY accepted that our sense of history, like our sense of memory and self-identity, is in large measure the result of arranging and telling stories. It is through stories that we construct the meaning of individual and collective experience just as it is through stories that we are moved to blame (or exonerate) others.”5 Sherwin’s statement above supports the thesis that popular stories in mass-fiction are valid expressions of cultural opinion and should be studied academically in the context of media criticism. However, this same thesis supports the view that law students should study the representation of legal issues critically in mass-media, due to their overwhelming influence in directing the public discourse of civil society. Indeed, in a culture that receives its news and politics almost exclusively through a media veil of representation, whether on television or on the internet, the awareness of the effect that mass-media communication and entertainment has on identity in civil society cannot be understated. As Sherwin writes again, “Law in our time has entered the age of images. Legal reality can no longer be properly understood, or assessed, apart from what appears on the screen.”6 In an example of how media representations of lawyers can reflect realistically and accurately the moral issues, hardships, and stress of the legal profession, an excellent example is the TV series “The Guardian”. This show tells the story of several law firms, one being a multi-generational and highly respected corporate law firm led by a character played by Dabney Coleman. Simon Baker plays the hero in the story as “Nick Fallin,” a young attorney just out of law school who runs into problems due to his arrogance and personal lifestyle. He ends up arrested, and forced to do community service at a public service law firm, where all manner of social issues such as rape, child molestation, broken families, drug addiction, domestic violence, and murder are the daily, over-burdened caseload. In serving at this alternative, public law firm, Fallon learns an entirely new side of life and society from the sheltered existence he had lived previously in private boarding schools, corporate law, and family privilege. The realistic portrayal of attorneys in this program breaks traditional stereotypes of the activist and corporate lawyer, while still building force from the character archetype of the lawyer in its dualities. “Favorable portrayals of lawyers in popular culture tend to adopt a distinctive ethical perspective. This perspective departs radically from the premises of the ‘Conformist Moralism’ exemplified by the official ethics of the American bar and the arguments of the proponents of President Clinton's impeachment. While Conformist Moralism is strongly authoritarian and categorical, popular culture exalts a quality that might be called ‘Moral Pluck’--a combination of resourcefulness and transgression in the service of basic but informal values. This Essay traces the theme of Moral Pluck through three of the most prominent fictional portrayals of lawyers in recent years--the novels of John Grisham and the TV series L.A. Law and The Practice.”7 Simon’s quote above highlights the important summary of these issues, namely the importance of ethics in the legal profession and in the construction of the media stereotypes of the good and bad lawyer. That society and media choose to portray the activist and public serving attorney as good, and the corporate, private profit, and industry serving lawyer willing to bend the rules, or twist the law to benefit special interest groups as bad. This represents just one aspect of the many “Cowboys and Indians” dualities in contemporary society. The same themes can also be viewed in depictions of Wall St. Vs. Main St. in popular fiction. For professional law students studying popular culture and media representations of legal issues, attention to these issues of ethics as they are framed by society in popular culture is important to building and guiding a personal career in law. 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