Law Commons^™

A New Atticus Is Afoot: The Portrayal Of Lawyers In Popular Culture, Anna Thrush

Senior Theses

This project analyzes the stereotypical image of lawyers in popular culture, focusing on either overly demonic or unrealistically heroic. Both stereotypes that are common portrayals of attorneys in popular culture are unrealistic and deny society a true comprehension of the profession. Popular culture has molded the image of lawyers to the characteristics that sell, rather than focusing on a realistic portrayal. Therefore, popular culture creates a falsely dramatized image of attorneys to generate revenue, putting the reputation and future of the profession as risk. These stereotypes are exemplified in this project through a close literary analysis of lawyer characters from …

As Seen On Screen: American Ambivalence Shown Through Death Penalty And Vigilante Films, Lisette Donewald

Honors Scholar Theses

The United States is one of the last western nations still practicing capital punishment. A history of and commitment to vigilantism and its ideals offers an explanation of America’s retention of capital punishment. Employing scholarship on law and popular culture and vigilantism, this thesis finds that pro-death penalty frames are prevalent in vigilante films while anti-death penalty frames are prevalent in films that focus specifically upon capital punishment. Since the 1960’s however, there has been a gradual shift towards anti-death penalty frames and away from pro-death penalty frames as well as changes in the themes presented in the two genres …

Hbo’S "The Wire" And Its Portrayal Of Baltimore Politics, Schools, And The Judicial System In Season 4: Was It Accurate Then And Does It Stand The Test Of Time?, Josephine Klingeman

Honors Theses

This thesis is a content analysis of HBO’s fourth season of The Wire. After conducting an in-depth analysis of the content in the thirteen episodes of season four, I then assessed the level of accuracy in the show’s portrayal of two major topics discussed throughout the season: Witness protection and police informant harassment. I did so by conducting several interviews with professionals who have several decades of experience working in the criminal justice system. I compared their personal experience with witness protection programs, witness harassment, and police informant harassment with the content presented in The Wire on these topics. …

Batman The Noble Dog: The Costs Of Spiritedness For The Individual And Society, Ian Drake

Department of Political Science and Law Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works

Batman’s self-imposed mission to rid Gotham City of its criminal element has always presented the problem of vigilantism. From the perspective of criminology, Batman’s methods raise the problem of whether society can be governed, or govern itself, with extralegal law enforcement. The problem presented by Batman’s behavior is often stated, as the ancient Roman satirist Juvenal famously put it, “quis custodiet ipsos custodes?” (“but who is going to guard the guards themselves?”).1 The threat posed by selfappointed guardians, such as Batman and other super heroes, has been frequently analyzed by scholars and fans alike. Yet, there is an additional, less …

Intellectual Property In Experience, Madhavi Sunder

Michigan Law Review

In today’s economy, consumers demand experiences. From Star Wars to Harry Potter, fans do not just want to watch or read about their favorite characters— they want to be them. They don the robes of Gryffindor, flick their wands, and drink the butterbeer. The owners of fantasy properties understand this, expanding their offerings from light sabers to the Galaxy’s Edge®, the new Disney Star Wars immersive theme park opening in 2019.Since Star Wars, Congress and the courts have abetted what is now a $262 billion-a-year industry in merchandising, fashioning “merchandising rights” appurtenant to copyrights and trademarks that give fantasy owners …

Honey, You're No June Cleaver: The Power Of "Dropping Pop" To Persuade, Victoria S. Salzmann

Maine Law Review

Imagine a contentious child-custody hearing in which the husband is testifying about his wife's behavior. If he were to state “she is no June Cleaver,” that testimony would have an immediate impact upon those present. Most people would understand that the husband was making a reference to Mrs. Ward Cleaver, the pearl-clad mother figure from the popular 1950s television show Leave It to Beaver. However, the reference does more than simply call to mind 1950s television. It is a vivid popular-culture allusion that immediately taps into the psyche of anyone familiar with the show. It tells the listener that the …

Leisure/Crime, Immaterial Labor, And The Performance Of The Teenage Girl In Harmony Korine’S Spring Breakers (2012) And Sofia Coppola’S The Bling Ring (2013), Maryn Wilkinson

Journal of Feminist Scholarship

Harmony Korine’s Spring Breakers (2012) and Sofia Coppola’s The Bling Ring (2013) introduced audiences to girls exploring criminal behavior both for and as leisure. The films introduce an idea of leisure/crime: criminal acts that appear to develop as natural, fruitful extensions of leisure activities, circumnavigating conventional laws of capitalism, yet still allow its actors to access, attain, and consume goods, money, value, and status. Through close analysis of the films’ style and character performances, this article proposes that the films and their enactments of leisure/crime in fact offer complex critical commentary on contemporary relations between the representation of teenage girls, …

Popular Culture And Legal Pluralism: Narrative As Law. By Wendy A. Adams [Book Review], Dana Neacsu

Law Faculty Publications

Wendy Adams’ book is published in Routledge's “Law, Justice, and Power” series, edited by Austin Sarat. Like Sarat, Adams, who teaches law at McGill University, belongs to the school of "cultural studies of law". Thus, her writing is refreshingly cosmopolitan and interdisciplinary. Her project is to build a “legal narrative,” which is a framework for popular culture as law, where illegal acts could easily become re-imagined in an alternative legality. She argues that “legal texts originating with the state may well be of less significance in creating legal meaning in our lives than the representations of law in popular culture.”

February 4, 2016: Is This Weimar?, Bruce Ledewitz

Hallowed Secularism

Blog post, “Is This Weimar?“ discusses politics, theology and the law in relation to religion and public life in the democratic United States of America.

December 9, 2015: The Spirit Of Doom, Bruce Ledewitz

Hallowed Secularism

Blog post, “The Spirit of Doom“ discusses politics, theology and the law in relation to religion and public life in the democratic United States of America.

August 1, 2015: What We Can Learn From Fifty Shades Of Grey, Bruce Ledewitz

Hallowed Secularism

Blog post, “ What We Can Learn from Fifty Shades of Grey“ discusses politics, theology and the law in relation to religion and public life in the democratic United States of America.

Sherlock Holmes And The Case Of The Lucrative Fandom: Recognizing The Economic Power Of Fanworks And Reimagining Fair Use In Copyright, Stacey M. Lantagne

Michigan Telecommunications & Technology Law Review

Fan culture, in the form of fan-created works like fanfiction, fanart, and fanvids, is often associated with the Internet. However, fandom has existed for as long as stories have been told. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories inspired a passionate fandom long before the age of the Internet. Despite their persistence, fanworks have long existed in a gray area of copyright law. Determining if any given fanwork is infringing requires a fair use analysis. Although these analyses pay lip service to a requirement of aesthetic neutrality, they tend to become bogged down by unarticulated artistic judgments that hinge on …

What Zombies Can Teach Law Students: Popular Text Inclusion In Law And Literature, Thomas E. Simmons

Mercer Law Review

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The productive use of zombies in a law school curriculum is not limited to hypothetical scenarios and posing "what if' questions. The content of an interdisciplinary law and literature course could be expanded to include consideration of texts that reference zombies. While serious, canonical works such as Dickens's Bleak House, Otto Preminger's Anatomy of a Murder, and Kafka's The Trial constitute examples of literature and film that merit serious study in a course in law and literature, I will assert that lesser texts should also be included, both as a way to highlight why Martin Scorsese outshines George …

Moving Forward/Looking Back: Reclaiming And Revising Our Feminist Past And Searching For Solidarity, Cassandra Denise Fetters

Journal of Feminist Scholarship

Interweaving personal anecdotes, feminist theory, and literary and popular culture references, this article attempts to provide answers to the question of how we build a social movement and establish solidarity among women while still recognizing and respecting difference. The article traces historical accounts of feminists contending with the “difference impasse” and argues that we should return to and revise the feminist thought that preceded us, weaving together theories from our feminist past with contemporary models, including those of feminist psychoanalyst Jessica Benjamin and her ideas of “mutual recognition” and intersubjectivity. Drawing on fictional accounts from literature by women writers, the …

The Rise And Fall Of Bad Judge: Lady Justice Is No Tramp, Taylor Simpson-Wood

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

“Ahead Of The Lawmen”: Law And Morality In Disney Animated Films 1960–1998, Nehal A. Patel

Nehal A. Patel

This article examines the relationship between law and morality in a selection of animated Disney movies released between 1960 and 1998. The authors analyze all of the fully-animated, G-rated movies that grossed $100 million or more (adjusted for inflation) which shaped the childhood of lawyers practicing today. We find that the predominant representation of the relationship between law and morality is that they are at odds. Law most often is portrayed as having no relationship to morality or, even worse, as an obstacle to justice. These findings have implications for theories of law and morality, justice, and ethics. These findings …

Dark Justice: Women Legal Actors On Basic Cable, Taunya Banks

Taunya Lovell Banks

No abstract provided.

Law And Justice On The Small Screen, Jessica Silbey

Books

'Law and Justice on the Small Screen' is a wide-ranging collection of essays about law in and on television. In light of the book's innovative taxonomy of the field and its international reach, it will make a novel contribution to the scholarly literature about law and popular culture. Television shows from France, Canada, the United Kingdom, Germany, Spain and the United States are discussed. The essays are organised into three sections: (1) methodological questions regarding the analysis of law and popular culture on television; (2) a focus on genre studies within television programming (including a subsection on reality television), and …

January 22, 2012: Jesus Hopped The 'A' Train, Bruce Ledewitz

Hallowed Secularism

Blog post, “Jesus Hopped the 'A' Train“ discusses politics, theology and the law in relation to religion and public life in the democratic United States of America.

Images In/Of Law, Jessica M. Silbey

Jessica Silbey

The proliferation of images in and of law lends itself to surprisingly complex problems of epistemology and power. Understanding through images is innate; most of us easily understand images without thinking. But arriving at mutually agreeable understandings of images is also difficult. Translating images into shared words leads to multiple problems inherent in translation and that pose problems for justice. Despite our saturated imagistic culture, we have not established methods to pursue that translation process with confidence. This article explains how images are intuitively understood and yet collectively inscrutable, posing unique problems for resolving legal conflicts that demand common and …

A Contrarian View Of Copyright: Hip-Hop, Sampling, And Semiotic Democracy, Thomas Joo

Thomas W Joo

A dominant trend in intellectual property (IP) theory asserts that technologies such as digital copying enable individuals to resist the cultural dominance of the media industry. Under this view, individuals appropriate cultural material and “recode” it by assigning alternative meanings to it. By enabling more people to participate in the making of cultural meanings, recoding supposedly enhances “semiotic democracy.” IP theorists tend to argue that copyright law inhibits recoding, thus stifling semiotic democracy. The use of sampling in hip-hop music is frequently cited as a paradigmatic example of recoding that has been stifled by IP law.

This paper uses history, …

The Rise And Fall Of The Miranda Warnings In Popular Culture, Ronald Steiner, Rebecca Bauer, Rohit Talwar

Cleveland State Law Review

While Dickerson's rationale is certainly correct in presuming that those over thirty have already learned about the Miranda warning from decades of television, younger generations only have today's Miranda-less programming on which to form their assumptions about law enforcement. Miranda can still be found on television, but its presence has severely diminished over the years. If this trend continues, how will America's current youth internalize the Miranda warning in the way older generations have? Near-universal awareness of Miranda is an artifact of a shared popular culture in which the repetition of the warnings was pervasive and inescapable. But how can …

October 31, 2010: Why I Wish No One Had Gone To The Stewart/Colbert Rally, Bruce Ledewitz

Hallowed Secularism

Blog post, “Why I Wish No One Had Gone to the Stewart/Colbert Rally“ discusses politics, theology and the law in relation to religion and public life in the democratic United States of America.

October 17, 2010: Woody Allen’S Hell, Bruce Ledewitz

Hallowed Secularism

Blog post, “Woody Allen’s Hell“ discusses politics, theology and the law in relation to religion and public life in the democratic United States of America.

The Judge As Author / The Author As Judge, Ryan B. Witte

Golden Gate University Law Review

The first section of this Article discusses the judge as an author. This section begins with an examination of the audience for judicial opinions and an outline of the different styles of judicial opinion writing. The second section of this Article examines the advantages and disadvantages of using literary tools to advance the law. The third section of this Article explores the role of the author as a judge. This section will study a small number of judges who, in addition to the law, maintain outside lives as authors or creative writers. Judges who fit into this category include authors …

May 19, 2010: Steve Martin Sings The Blues, Bruce Ledewitz

Hallowed Secularism

Blog post, “Steve Martin Sings the Blues“ discusses politics, theology and the law in relation to religion and public life in the democratic United States of America.

January 25, 2010: What About Pedro?, Bruce Ledewitz

Hallowed Secularism

Blog post, “What About Pedro?“ discusses politics, theology and the law in relation to religion and public life in the democratic United States of America.

January 19, 2010: Dances With Wolves Meets The Matrix, Bruce Ledewitz

Hallowed Secularism

Blog post, “Dances with Wolves Meets The Matrix“ discusses politics, theology and the law in relation to religion and public life in the democratic United States of America.

Sex Education And Rape, Michelle J. Anderson

Michigan Journal of Gender & Law

In the law of rape, consent has been and remains a gendered concept. Consent presumes female acquiescence to male sexual initiation. It presumes a man desires to penetrate a woman sexually. It presumes the woman willingly yields to the man's desires. It does not presume, and of course does not require, female sexual desire. Consent is what the law calls it when he advances and she does not put up a fight. I have argued elsewhere that the kind of thin consent that the law focuses on is not enough ethically and it should not be enough legally to justify …

Rethinking Consent In A Big Love Way, Cheryl Hanna

Michigan Journal of Gender & Law

This Article is based on a presentation at the Michigan Journal of Gender and Law as part of their symposium "Rhetoric & Relevance: An Investigation into the Present & Future of Feminist Legal Theory." In it, I explore the problem of categorical exclusions to the consent doctrine in private intimate relationships through the lens of the HBO series Big Love, which is about modern polygamy. There remains the normative question both after Lawrence v. Texas and in feminist legal theory of under what circumstances individuals should be able to consent to activity that takes place within the context of a …