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Volume 30, Number 4 (1996) reprinted by permission of the Law Review© cite as 30 U.S.F.L. REV. 1051
By JOHN DENVIR*
LAWYERS AND MOVIES are a natural pairing in
American culture; not only are "trial" movies one of the most durable of
the Hollywood genres, but my informal polling over the last decade shows
that lawyers love movies, especially ones featuring lawyer protagonists.
Unfortunately, lawyers usually place movies in the "guilty pleasures" category
of activity, never suspecting that movies about law and lawyers have a
lot to teach us about the American legal system and the men and women who
operate it.
The conference Picturing Justice: Images of Law and Lawyers in the Visual Media1 was designed to illustrate how the study of film complements the traditional sources of law. Film provides perspectives on law that the traditional legal "canon" ignores. I do not argue that watching movies is a substitute for traditional legal education, but I do believe that it emphasizes important facets of the legal enterprise that statutes, cases, and treatises tend to undervalue. For instance, since the time of Christopher Columbus Langdell, law schools have tended to view law as a universe of rules and principles that the lawyer-scientist must master. Since "rules" have little "star power," films emphasize that law is about people more than rules, a point nicely illustrated in Bill Nichols' essay on Twelve Angry Men, which leads off this collection of essays. Likewise, traditional legal arguments tend to favor hard logic and suspect appeals to emotion. But movie audiences crave emotional stimulus and therefore movies view the crucial issue in law as one of justice versus injustice rather than logic versus irrationality. Of course, logic is not the adversary of justice, but logic alone is insufficient. Carolyn Patty Blum's essay on In The Name of The Father illustrates this point well. Gareth Pierce (Emma Thompson) certainly makes good use of logic in her defense of Gerry Conlon, but it is her passion for justice that makes her a great, not just a competent, lawyer. Finally, "official" law speaks in an authoritarian voice; it would like us to believe that there is always one right answer to every legal issue, specifically the solution adopted by the majority opinion. Film accepts a more messy reality; it recognizes the role of ambiguity in human affairs, including law. This thicker portrayal of social reality permits it to explore tensions in and about law that traditional sources too often suppress. John Osborn's subversive reading of To Kill A Mockingbird is a good example of this use of film. One need not agree with Osborn's unconventional (but brilliantly argued) conclusions to recognize that the open-endedness of the film medium has allowed him intellectual space to develop provocative insights on how law and lawyers operate. So too, Norman Rosenberg's essay on Talk of the Town illustrates that one film can provide the vehicle for two opposing images of law. In conjunction with the Picturing Justice conference, the University of San Francisco Law Review invited a select group of lawyers and professors to write short essays exploring the utility of film to the understanding of how law and lawyers are perceived in America to be published under the collective title One Movie No Lawyer Should Miss. The essays were to be informal in tone and written for lawyers and lovers of film, not specialists in film studies. The first seven essays deal generally with how law and lawyers are represented in American film. We open here with three essays that take a positive slant on the potential of law to attain justice, Bill Nichols' discussion of Twelve Angry Men, Carolyn Patty Blum's essay on In The Name of The Father, and Rob Waring's memories of his first viewing of Z. Then Norman Rosenberg discusses images of law found in Talk of the Town while Francis Nevins rediscovers Man in the Middle, which he claims is a "classic of the Warren Court."2 Judith Grant takes a more ironic view of the lawyer "superheroes" who populate the novels of John Grisham and the movies based on them. Finally, Cheyney Ryan illustrates that Busby Berkeley's comedy Gold Diggers of 1933 portrays the world of law as an obstacle to human happiness, a goal that can only be achieved backstage where the law of desire rules. The next two essays both focus on what might be lawyers' all-time favorite lawyer film, To Kill a Mockingbird. Michael Asimow ably defends the thesis that Atticus Finch is the true legal hero, "[a] man sincerely devoted to truth and justice."3 John Osborn has another interpretation of the film, which he calls a "film about a man standing up for traditional values to the point of insanity."4 Carole Shapiro and Roberta Harding both use their essays to examine how a film can foster (or stunt) discussion of larger legal issues. Both use Dead Man Walking as an example of a filmic meditation on the morality of capital punishment. The reader will enjoy each author's dialogue with the film and, implicitly, with each other. Steve Greenfield and Guy Osborn continue this examination of the criminal justice system in their essay on In the Name of the Father and Let Him Have It. David Ray Papke's essay shares with that of Ira Lurvey and Selise Eiseman a focus on how divorce lawyers are pictured in American film, each essay using Kramer vs. Kramer as an illustration. Here we are reminded that if film holds up a mirror to lawyers, often it's a distorted one reflecting more the film's dramatic needs than courtroom reality. Gerald Uelman and Nell Minow both make a parallel point about the relation of movie law and legal reality in their essays on Inherit the Wind. Of course, the fact that films show little concern for factual accuracy does not detract from their importance to lawyers, since everyday citizens see more law movies than trials and readily accept the image for the reality. Eventually the legal "reality" evolves to copy the image, one of the many lessons we might learn from the O.J. Simpson trial. The final essay is by Paul Bergman. Most of our authors took lightly our invitation to pick only one film no lawyer should miss, but Bergman showed himself the most expansive of all, cleverly documenting fifteen different films, which all feature what he terms "courtroom pranks."5 We believe that the reader will find each essays not only enjoyable, but also intellectually provocative. After reading them, I hope you will agree that "law" movies need no longer be "guilty pleasures." |
