LAW4538 - Lawyers, literature and cinema

This unit will explore the academic subject of 'Law and Popular Culture' by utilizing some of the classic literary and cinematic 'texts' that treat with the Law, lawyers, legal practice, and legal reasoning. A student successfully completing this unit should be expected to demonstrate proficiency in discussing the following four issues that will be covered by this course.

1. Employing an inter-disciplinary approach grounded primarily, but not exclusively, upon cultural studies and critical theory, the unit will examine the representation of law and lawyers within popular culture, primarily through their respective depictions in the 'mass media' form of both literature (popular and elitist) and cinema. An additional objective is to introduce students to the branch of critical legal studies known as 'law and literature', which can be broken down into three components:
1. the ideology of law and legal practice as a means of both legitimizing and critiquing contemporary legal culture
2. the discursive nature of representations of law and lawyers within the wider community that govern the social perceptions of legal practice and dispute resolution
3. the social function of the cultural representation of law, which operates to reconcile the community to orthodox legal practice through the creation and circulation of a set of stereotypes and collective expectations concerning legal standards and outcomes.

2. The primary sources of literature and cinema will be used as an alternative, or 'non-academic', means for a critical and reflective consideration of outstanding issues in more formally academic domains of legal scholarship, including legal ethics and the philosophy of law. The study of the literary and cinematic treatment of classic problems of jurisprudence, including the nature of the rule of law, the social contract, sovereignty, due process, and natural justice, will reveal the extent to which formal legal theory serves as an expression of wider patterns of cultural and aesthetic forms of reasoning.

3. Employing both academic (secondary) and non-academic (primary) texts, the unit will consider a number of important facets of critical legal scholarship, most importantly the 'law and literature' movement, which tries to both explain and critique law in terms of the various literary techniques of dramatic narrative. This unit largely operates within the 'law and literature' tradition by directly engaging with novels and films, both of which are highly narrative-driven artistic forms. The text's depiction and resolution of the legal issue under its consideration will be discussed in class as a parallel, or secondary, commentary on the centrality of narrative to all forms of legal speech and practice.

4. The unit will offer a wider and more sophisticated understanding of the nature and value of inter-disciplinary approaches, such as cultural studies, to the development of legal scholarship than is offered in traditional 'black letter' law courses.