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Proceedings of a Conference (Littleton, CO: Fred B. Rothman & Co., 1993) ©Tarlton Law Library Why Should Lawyers Study Popular Culture? Ray B. Browne* and influence popular culture. Hence the study of popular culture should be indispensable to people in the legal profession. Popular culture is not only entertainment, not only the media. It covers 98-99 percent of American society today in one way or another. It is the life-scene, the life-action, the way of existence of nearly all Americans, and it creates the culture in which all must live, even the few among us who claim to hate and be unaffected by it. Popular culture is the way we live while we're awake, how we sleep and what we dream. It con- trols what we can and cannot do. It is our political and legal life-style and -content. The legal profession, whether it looks upon itself as be- longing to the Humanities or the Social Sciences, needs to understand the interplay it has with the forces shaping and animating society, i.e., the popular culture. In the past, the Humanities were looked upon as residing in the Classics, the "best said and thought" of all times, and some conservatives still anachronistically hold that view. Now, how- ever, increasingly it is recognized that the New Humanities -- those ap- propriate for our times -- are the Popular Culture. The legal profession now virtually controls the first Three Estates -- the Executive, Legislative and Judicial -- and is infiltrating what might be called the Fifth Estate, the Popular Culture. American society must be the most litigious in the world - and is getting more so as we become more and more democratic. We used to say: "There ought to be a law," and now there generally is. More and more we are asking: "Why don't you sue'? You could get a bundle." And gener- ally we do sue, and do get a bundle. Legal shingles are a part of the landscape, almost as numerous as TV antennas on the top of houses used to be, and as visible. The omnipresence of lawyers has been ad- dressed in a thoughtful study1 which suggests that lawyers' ambitions have led to judicial gridlock -- with frightening potential for the fu- ture. On the presence of lawyers in society, Shakespeare lashed out, "The first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers."2 But that is the ul- timate cure for the problem. There is a less heroic remedy. Nineteenth-century British novelist Walter Scott suggested education: "A lawyer without history or literature is a mechanic, a mere working mason; if he possesses some knowledge of these, he may venture to call himself an architect."3 Nowadays the lawyer needs far more knowledge than history or literature. He needs information on all as- pects of culture. If he possesses all this knowledge -- or even a part of it -- he may call himself a "New Humanist"; that is, somebody who knows his way around in the Popular Culture of his nation and of the world. That culture speaks in many tongues. Literature, for example- only one portion of the culture -- echoes the law in many ways. In Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, a handbook for people interested in lit- erary allusions, for instance, there are at least two hundred references to law and lawyers. A lawyer's parallel handbook, a Bartlett's Familiar Legal Quotes (if there was one) should contain hundreds of references to literature and the other media of popular culture in or- der for its users to be effectively allusive. In immersing themselves deeply into the culture which they serve, the lawyer becomes a more knowledgeable, understanding guardian of society. In so doing, they help themselves and society. The most effective lawyers are those with the referential tongue. We all know the successful lawyers of the past who peppered their knowledge with quotations from Shakespeare, the Bible, Abe Lincoln, Mark Twain and many other authorities as naturally as legal precedent and the law. Those references were to the popular culture of the past. Now, with an inflated economy and more accessible information, the silver tongue must become golden, and the golden-tongued lawyer of the present must have a much wider range of quotes -- from the mass me- dia and the non-mass media. And they are most effective if brought to us, if not on the wings of golden music, at least in the words of rock- 'n'-roll. The voice of the lawyer, like that of the Biblical turtle, is heard everywhere. At any given time, we have lawyers in at least a dozen television series and dramas. In a recent article, Suzanne Frentz specu- lates that the public learns a great deal about law from such dramas.4 In a recent book, Gary Bums quotes TV Guide, complaining that "54% of Americans know that Judge [Joseph] Wapner runs The People's Court but only 9 percent know that Justice William Rehnquist heads the Supreme Court."5 Bums suggests that it is ironic that TV Guide prescribes more television watching as a cure for this imbalance. But the magazine may be correct, without perhaps really knowing why and without outlining what kind of television watching would be appropriate. People would undoubtedly be better informed if they watched more television but fewer TV series and dramas. Lawyers saturate the drama programs, but are also deeply involved in the non-drama news and talk shows. They are also everywhere off television. In fiction, for example. There are perhaps two dozen lawyers writing fiction with their kind as protagonists, and literally hundreds of novels by non-lawyers with the legal establishment as "the enemy." Among the lawyer-authors are such writers as Melville Davisson Post (perhaps the surrogate of them all), H.C. Bailey, Sarah Caudwell, Erle Stanley Gardner, Anthony Gilbert (really Lucy Beatrice Malleson), John Grisham, Michael Gilbert, Robert H. van Gulik, Cyril Hare, Joe Hensley (a judge), Michael A. Kahn, Harold Q. Masur, Lia Matera, John Clifford Mortimer (whose Horace Rumpole of Old Bailey is surely one of the more famous), Haughton Murphy, Francis Nevins, William G. Tapply, and others. Of these, Erie Stanley Gardner's Perry Mason and Mortimer's Horace Rumpole are the longest-lasting and perhaps best-known examples. We have lawyers advising the President, writing his speeches, advising members of the Cabinet and all federal and state government officers, all CEO's and lesser executives, the Pope, all areas of environment and ecology, working in religion, sports, medicine, comics. They are everywhere! These are pictures of the lawyer at work in the Popular Culture. Often the portrait is of the lawyer protecting human rights, the ecology, the consumer, and so forth, often pro bono. Countering those favorable pictures are those of the lawyer chasing ambulances, soliciting those people who might have been hurt in traffic accidents or by clumsy doctors, encouraging all kinds of litigation in order to get a cut of the loot, or at least aiding and abetting. This is the profile of the lawyer trying in every way to establish his autonomy and to take over the Fifth Estate, that of the Popular Culture. But those are really only the most visible ways the law and the lawyer are associated with popular culture. They are the tip of the ice- berg. Those tips melt and add to the general supply of culture. But the real moving force of the bulk lies under the surface, ponderous and powerful but sometimes without any visible evidence of existence. All contributions are important. I would like to discuss some of these forces, with the suggestion that they are vital areas of lawyers' con- cern, fundamental areas for lawyers' research in the "New Humanities." To a certain extent lawyers are already reaching out in the New Humanities. Since 1985, at every annual meeting of the American Culture Association, for example, 35-40 lawyers and law professors hold sessions on various aspects of culture and the law. At a recent meeting, there were papers on "Construction and Deconstruction of an American Lawyer," by David Reidy; "Peel and the Layers of Professionalism," by Michael Ariens; "Lawyers and Personal Mythology," by James R. Elkins; "Legal Themes in the Works of Mark Twain," by David Papke. In 1986, Glenn Browne and I edited a book called Laws of our Fathers: Popular Culture and the U.S. Constitution,6 that contained, in addition to the usual kind of essays, studies such as: "Mythical Animals and the Living Constitution: Interpreting Tradition"; "The Myth of the Constitution: 19th Century Constitutional Iconography"; "Architecture and the Constitution"; "Cults, Crusaders and the Constitution"; and "Futuristic Comic Books and Contemporary Society." The latest effort to study the field widely is a collection of sev- eral essays edited by Professor David Ray Papke and Paul T. Hayden for the Journal of American Culture, which explores, among other things, "the roles the rule of law, constitutionalism and trial imagery play in the dominant culture."7 Also examined are the "fundamental American legal institutions -- the legal profession, the courts and the law itself, and American rebellion against them. These essays are very much in the proper direction for studies in the real understand- ing of the Humanities and the law. But there are other very deep and significant forces at work in culture and the legal profession that lawyers should devote their time to. One of the most obvious is the changing place of elitism in the le- gal profession and its implications for American society. For two hundred years, despite the roles of Andrew Jackson, Abraham Lincoln and many other influential figures, the legal profession and the vari- ous levels of government have been dominated by East coast legal elitism. National politics until Lyndon Johnson was dominated by the East Coast, presumably the home of liberalism and wisdom. To a large extent the Establishment still has an Eastern tilt. No one watching the hearings for confirmation of Clarence Thomas for appointment to the Supreme Court could have missed the hundreds of times it was stated that Thomas came from "a good law school," always Yale, and that even Anita Hill was graduated from a good law school, though she had subsequently fallen into the hands of evil in the shape of fantasizing. The "good ole law school" links, like the "good ole boy" network, hold tight sometimes in the safest but perhaps somewhat self- conscious and defensive areas. For example, during the 200th an- niversary celebration of the writing of the U.S. Constitution, the U.S. Government through the Bicentennial Commission, the National Endowment for the Humanities and numerous other agencies, adver- tised through many of the media for people to apply for grants to study and celebrate the Constitution. Being naive, I assumed that all qualified Americans were eligible. I therefore proposed to the NEH that I be given funds to hold a summer symposium on the Constitution and the Culture of the People, to which I would invite scholars in Popular Culture Studies and the Humanities and people representing the law. My request was summarily turned down, and I was told that the study of the Constitution must be left to "Constitution Scholars and Constitution Lawyers." As though no- body else is touched by or is concerned with the Constitution! Now, I suggest that this position was held by people ignorant of the role of the Constitution in American life, indifferent to the force that every- day culture has had on shaping the Constitution, and determined to hold onto the positions of privilege that exclusion gives them as long as possible. No such position, aided and abetted by the tax-supported National Endowment for the Humanities, can serve American democ- racy as fully as it should, and, in fact, constitutes a conspiracy. This conspiracy is supported in part by lawyers. Everybody has at least a superficial observation about how much power lawyers have. Law and its servants can be agents for the status quo or for the cutting edge of change. Like doctors, lawyers tend to be out for them- selves rather than for the public good, some people think. On the other hand, on television entertainment shows, lawyers like Horace Rumpole, Perry Mason, and others, are determined to see that justice is done regardless of class, color, religion or gender. That is show biz. Though it affects the stereotype that many of us have, there is another, sharper image of the lawyer -- and the law -- that we get from television and the other mass media, and it is not so favorable -- that of the sharp, self-aggrandizing, legal eagle who knows how to manipulate the law that his kind wrote to get their clients off. Two excellent examples are the Clarence Thomas hearings, mentioned above, and the William Kennedy Smith rape trial held during early December, 1991, in West Palm Beach, Florida. As we ob- servers see it, our legal system of confrontation means head-on colli- sion between legal maneuverings, not between truth and error, right and wrong. The wealthy and prestigious benefit; the poor and weak continue to be crushed. Justice is supposed to be blind. It is stupid, too, some people would conclude by watching television and reading about the actions. Incidentally, had Smith been found guilty and his appeal had gone all the way to the Supreme Court, it would have been interesting to read the opinion of Associate Justice Clarence Thomas. The various talk shows on television also reveal how many lawyers there are and how they influence society. If there are too many within the Washington Beltway, as many people there claim, there are also a lot of them elsewhere in the land. There are three ba- bies bom every second throughout the world. There must be at least one lawyer born every three hundred seconds in the U.S. alone. The law is -- or was -- one of the greatest growth industries in America to- day. With a force of 800,000 lawyers in the U.S. today, they are more numerous than professors interested in the Humanities. They there- fore constitute a great potential for promoting the Humanities. They could easily be agents for the good of culture by helping reveal the role of the law and the lawyer in the Humanities. Television has had the most profound impact on the Humanities of any of the mass media. The camcorder, following still photography, for example, has thoroughly democratized the legal system and the pursuit of legal justice. Now every citizen, regardless of background, can be a recording witness to any event, driven by the compulsion to use the camcorder he has, and can sell the evidence for wide distribution. That camcorder and the TV broadcast that it feeds now demonstrate just how slowly and erratically the wheels of justice grind. In the past, trials that leaked to the press through books, word of mouth, or newspapers and radio were felt to be at some distance from society. People did not experience them in the living room im- mediately, even as they were happening. Now, however, CNN and Court TV bring us the actual proceedings in living color, with all the warts and boredom attendant thereto. The courtroom is a stage. But often the action is slow and tedious. Every kind of activity is brought to bear to enliven it and to explain the goings-on. Outside the Smith rape trial, for example, there was a shadow jury composed of precisely the same kind of people who were on the actual one, whose sole func- tion it was to tell, at the end of the day, how their minds had been in- fluenced by the evidence. Elsewhere, lawyers and legal experts were used by many media to discuss the legal proceedings and the conclu- sions reached so far. The trial became a kind of betting pool. There are several possible results of such activity: (1) it will surely make all of society more aware of how the courts work, how slowly and imperfectly; (2) it may increase litigation in the short-run as more people with show-off mentalities bum to star on television; but it will probably lessen litigation in the long run because people will realize that although they may get their hour in the light of the camera, law is still in the hands of the clever and powerful, and they may as well plea-bargain and get the ordeal over; (3) "TV-izing" le- gal proceedings might well increase the amount of individual vigilan- tism and violence on the streets because people will see that in order to get "justice," as they define it, they will have to take the law into their own hands -- they cannot count on a legal system that is virtually self- paralyzed, expensive, and moves at an intolerable snail's pace. Television coverage of legal proceedings will continue to in- crease. At the moment, forty-five states allow some coverage: twenty- five in trial courts, twenty in appellate courts. Federal courts in six districts are experimenting with some openness to TV. Both branches of the federal legislature -- the Senate and the House of Representatives -- finally bowed to public pressure and admitted mod- ified television coverage. Possibly the U.S. Supreme Court, the court of last resort, will eventually be aired on television. Undoubtedly, there will be both short-range and long-range results from this develop- ment: (1) there will be a decrease in respect for the Court and the Justices until (2) the public's degree of sophistication rises to the level of appreciating the fact that the Justices and lawyers are people just like themselves, though invested with awesome responsibilities and powers. The task of making the public understand imposes an obliga- tion on lawyers, both to bring the legal humanities to the public and the public to the legal humanities so that the legal humanities becomes more understandable and the public more understanding. Many of the things I have been talking about are areas of deep concern to the Humanities scholars and should be areas of in- quiry by lawyers. Some are obvious; others are arcane and subtle. Even more arcane and subtle, but profoundly important, are various other elements of popular culture. Art, for example, is one. Art historian Alan Gowans insists that all art, no matter how elusive, is purposeful and was created for some particular end -- to sway the mind, to direct behavior, to make a buck. All "arty" enhancements, he insists, are dressing to make the purpose more attainable. Thus, the picture frame, the cloistered setting of the museum -- all environ- ments -- drive the ultimate purpose of the art. Generally, a major pur- pose of all museum art, it could be argued, is to perpetuate the elite in power, to deny democracy. Other pieces of art are, of course, revolu- tionary, but generally, once the revolutionary piece of art is housed in a museum it loses its cutting edge and becomes literally a "museum piece," an object of study, even of adulation, but with its original fire banked. Clearly, there can be a direct correlation between art -- and the arts in general -- and the law, as lawyers interact with the art culture and try to strengthen -- or weaken -- the ultimate purpose and effect. More knowledge is needed on the relationship between the law and the arts. There is, likewise, a correlation between architecture and law that probably needs more research and analysis. We are just as much influenced by where we live and work as we are by what we wear, what we eat, see, feel, and so forth, When Louis Sullivan built the first skyscraper in Chicago in the 1890s he changed a whole concept of American society about the function of buildings. When Frank Lloyd Wright discovered at the turn of the century that people had been building their buildings out of available materials and, because they could not raise them high, had built them close to the ground, he in- fluenced a whole way of thinking which undoubtedly drove lawyers in new ways of thinking and handling the law -- and of getting rich in the process. The motifs of psychology and finance that influence these aspects of the arts also influence the lawyer in his many dealings in other cultural developments, such as fashions, film, the automobile in- dustry, advertising, philosophy, and so forth. Every new level of un- derstanding in the arts demands new thinking on the part of the legal community in interpreting the development to the public and outlin- ing the relationship between the individual and society. All are vital. Among the most important drives in American society, un- doubtedly one of the most powerful, is the lure of freedom and rebel- lion. It has several manifestations in popular culture that the lawyer should be interested in. The frontier has always been the great myth in American popular culture. Most Americans believe that the freedom to move away from law and order shaped the American character and that the official closing of the frontier in 1890 went largely unnoticed in that character, or, as it slipped away, began unconsciously to gen- erate tensions that society could not handle. There have been many convolutions in society's reaction to the closing of the frontier. What had been the freedom of "Bonanza" became the ghetto of Detroit. Crime fiction writer Ross Macdonald recognized the continuance of those tensions in choosing southern California as the site for most of his fiction, where Americans, like lemmings, have been pushed against the sea and had to suffer the ten- sions of congestion and try to resolve them without mass murders. In many ways he was more prescient during the last thirty years than he might have realized. At this moment the tensions in that crucible of survival are generating an explosion. There are a recognized eighty- two different languages spoken in the area and probably many more dialects. Los Angeles is a boiling stew that spills over the edges every night in the ghettos. Undoubtedly, it will get worse. It is Emma Lazarus' prayer for the world's huddled masses answered with a vengeance. Another crucible of profound concern for the lawyer is pornography. There are many people who insist that pornography -- or the idea of pornography -- is precious to those who love the First Amendment to the Constitution. That pornography is the cutting edge that in one way or another furthers the clarification and movement of freedom in American society is obvious. But the issue may not be clear to all. Even the Supreme Court has been unable to define pornography, saying only that everybody recognizes it when they see it. The human body, especially women's, is the playing field where most of the action in pornography is played. Frontal nudity is a case in point. Topless women have caused much consternation and much legal activity in American society. Although there is no law dis- tinguishing between men's chests and women's, interpreters of the law have insisted that one is pomography-neuter, the other pornography- positive. Recently, however, a bombshell was cast into the legal inter- pretations when a judge refused to prosecute two women for appear- ing in public naked to the waist, citing that there is no legal descrip- tion making women's naked chests different from men's and there- fore illegal. For years, nudity was considered art -- as long as it was not moving. Eddie Cantor's movie Roman Scandals (1933) was a good case in point. He had a large round dais with nude women standing around the wall, with their long hair covering somewhat their bare breasts and loins. Now, however, action has been added to the art of nudity; now nudity in action can be considered art. Most of the musi- cal shows in Las Vegas have numerous show girls with their breasts bare and their genitalia covered only with G-strings. Oh Calcutta, the New York show, has mixed nude men and women gyrating on the stage. Those performances are, of course, art. There is another exam- ple of current interest: Sears Roebuck's Fruit of the Loom men's un- derwear has a TV commercial in which Delilah, wearing only a loose lacy black bra, teases Samson -- dressed in conventional baggy shorts. "Samson, those pants don't do a thing for you," she says, leaning luringly toward him. She hands him a pair of Fruit of the Loom briefs, which do so much for him when he puts them on that, having given the camera only a brief frontal shot, misunderstanding the as- signment, apparently, he reaches out and knocks down the pillars of the temple he and Delilah are in. Delilah, clearly frustrated over Samson's misunderstanding her suggestive message, berates him for his stupidity: "Samson," she says, "I told you to get your hair cut." Some people will call the ad salacious and pornographic; others will think it clever and cute. Surely it is a step toward a new and different kind of commercial on television, as TV, with the implications of two hundred channels and further fragmentation of audience, gets more and more realistic in its presentations. An even more threatening area of so-called pornography is found in rock-'n'-roll music. Before Buddy Holly and Elvis Presley, popular music generally expanded and confirmed the status quo. Hundreds of songs said, "Come, let's go. Long live the status quo." But Elvis changed all that and the status has been threatened ever since. The best recent example is perhaps the episode involving 2 Live Crew in Florida in 1991. There, the entertainers were charged with ob- scenity and acquitted; curiously, however, one man was found guilty of selling pornography when the recordings themselves had been de- clared non-pornographic. A parallel can be found in the notorious case in 1991 when the Cincinnati Museum of Art was indicted for showing the Robert Mapplethorpe photographs which had been declared pornographic by Cincinnati civic officials. The process by which both the Mapplethorpe photographs and the 2 Live Crew songs were declared non-pornographic is revealing and intolerable. In the Cincinnati Museum case, the Museum people called in art experts to declare, in their expert opinion, that the photographs were art. The use of shadow, proper spacing, creativity of camera angle, that kind of thing, raised suspected pornography into "art." In the case of 2 Live Crew, experts again proved that the "obscene" lines were really the art of expression and rebellion. Thus, again, lights and voices have been used to seduce the public. Throughout history art has been a toy of the privileged. It has been a leisure-time indulgence for the leisure-class, often at the ex- pense of the sweat and blood of the worker-creators. The expropria- tors use the arts to strengthen their positions. When they expropriate it they stamp it with their Good Art Seal of Approval and, in so doing, remove it from public domain and use. In so doing, they blunt the point of any rebellion and radicalism it might have had and turn it to their own purposes. Many of the arts -- architecture, music, painting, photography, music, fiction, movies, television, small things -- have grown up as statements of protest against the existing order which grants one way of life to one group and another way to other groups. In architecture, as we have seen, it was Louis Sullivan and Frank Lloyd Wright, among many. In comics art it was a whole battery of writers and artists, mostly the so-called "underground." In cars it was Henry Ford. In Mapplethorpe's photographs it was one man urinating into another's mouth. They are some of the outlandish grotesque panels in any of a dozen expressions. However offensive some people find something, we should remember that the drive behind pornography, if not the objects themselves, must be prized as the weapon that helps in the fight against privilege. The charge of pornography is the smoke-and- mirrors screen that the privileged invoke to be raised like an electric fence around pleasure for the unenfranchised. The elite want to re- serve all the fun for themselves --or why bother to be elite? Often the have-nots play into the hands of the elite by justifying their own tastes, their own arts, by comparison with that of the elite. But the exercise of the spirit that drives pornography must be constantly expanded in the name of the First Amendment of the Constitution. About that right one must carefully insist, "Use it or lose it." Those are some of the big things in popular culture that lawyers should be interested in -- the large Humanities -- for they manifest in clear ways such imperatives as human rights, women's rights, ethnicity, nationalism. But there are many aspects of culture which seem to be small and insignificant but are largely unrecognized areas as far as research into the legal aspects of culture is concerned. James Deetz has a suggestive book, In Small Things Forgotten,9 which includes many elements of popular culture ordinarily overlooked, such as furniture and domestic articles. Robert Blair St. George ex- tended the list by observing that "[h]ouses, furniture, teacups, probate inventories, diaries, account books, newspaper advertisements, and tax lists may all warrant investigation in the course of a single topic."10 He might have added wills. "Ground floors, upper chambers, and garrets are fragments of a playful language that gives shape to complex ideas," observed St. George.11 French historian Fernand Braudel feels that "[c]ostume is a language." 12 So is smell. Jules David Prown accurately observed from his analysis of material culture, that "objects are signs that convey meaning, a mode of communication, a form of language."13 Braudel concluded: "Everything is connected,"14 as did the informative series on PBS aired in 1990 by James Burke called, simply, "Connections." Nobody moves in smaller things, and sees the connections among them, better than the lawyer. Every wisp and marking, every artifact and trace, no matter how small and seemingly insignificant, is a potential case-winning clue. So the legal mind knows the value of the small. Lawyers are Masters of Minutiae. The lawyer is literate in the languages of evidence. Like de- tectives and other specialists, the lawyer can make the bits and pieces of life talk his language. There are other languages those bits and pieces can talk if one understands them. Some years ago a Humanities scholar decided that he would investigate and see if the Assyrians (of Biblical fame) had a sense of humor. In his investigation, Wilson E. Strand was forced to admit that there simply was not enough evidence to convince either way; the artifacts and bits of remains from that civi- lization could not cast a convincing light.15 But artifacts speak differ- ent languages to various investigators. Lawyers might have come up with a different conclusion, and they surely could have gained some insight into the legal practices the Assyrians used long ago. Such history is of great interest and importance to the people who want to understand how people have lived through the millions of years they have been on earth. The key to such knowledge is the popular culture of the time. Legal folklore has it that the Code of Hammurabi (fl. 1792-1750 B.C.) was one of the greatest legal systems of all times. But what did the locals think of it? Were they happy and prosperous under it, and would they have voted for it had they been given a referendum to approve or disapprove'? King Tut, though a child, was supposed to have exercised an effective legal system gov- erning the Egyptians. But how do we really know what went on in his kingdom during his short reign (fl. cl350 B.C.)? The answer does not lie in the tomb which he had slaves build for his remains and the trea- sures he stored there. On the contrary, the answers lie in the thousands of unopened graves of those slaves which are scattered unmarked throughout the desert around the pyramid. The fabric of life of the common person is what defines a culture. These are some of the areas -- explored and largely unex- plored -- that people working in the law should be analyzing. There are many others. In fact, all those cultural areas in which there is po- tential development and resulting tensions need to be investigated. The law is the matrix in which the forces of development and restraint collide and play out. Lawyers are the machine operators who keep the conflicting forces from overheating and destroying the central core. Thus, lawyers can be and should be very much interested in the cut- ture in which these forces operate. Lawyers should be concerned with the drives that push people toward new experiences and new con- sciousnesses. Lawyers should be concerned with good and evil -- with positive and negative -- in a profounder sense than mere law-abiding and law-breaking, conformning and non-conforming. Nobody, per- haps, is better qualified than the lawyer to extract the full value of the Humanities from the Popular Culture. The Humanities scholars have had a very limited success in their endeavors. They, and all others interested in these Humanities, need the assistance of lawyers who will study the Popular Culture; everyone, including the lawyers, will benefit. The need is urgent. Culture, Bowling Green State University, Bowling Green, Ohio. 1. Walter K. Olson, The Litigation Explosion: What Happened When America Unleashed the Lawsuit (New York: Dutton, 1991). 2. King Henry VI, Part II, act 4, sc. 2, line 129. 3. Walter Scott, Guy Mannering (New York: Dutton, 1906), 259. 4. Suzanne Frentz, "T.V. Law: Image vs. Reality," Focus on Law Studies 7 (Fall 1991): 1, 10. 5. Gary Burns, "Television and the Crisis in the Humanities," in Rejuvenating the Humanities, ed. Ray B. Browne and Marshall W. Fishwick (Bowling Green, Ohio: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1992), 149. 6. Ray B. Browne and Glenn J. Browne, Laws of Our Fathers: Popular Culture and the U.S. Constitution (Bowling Green, Ohio: Bowling Green State University, 1986). 7. David Ray Papke and Paul T. Hayden, "From the Editors," Journal of American Culture 15 (Spring 1992): 1. 8. Id. 9. (Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor Press, Doubleday, 1977). 10. Robert Blair St. George, ed., Material Life in America, 1600-1860 (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1988), 8. 11. Id., 5. 12. Fernand Braudel, Capitalism and Material Life, 1400-1800, trans. Miriam Kochan (New York: Harper Colophon, 1975), 235. 13. Jules David Prown, "Mind in Matter: An Introduction to Material Culture Theory and Method," in Material Life in America, 1600-1860, ed. Robert Blair St. George (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1988), 32. 14. Braudel, Capitalism and Material Life, 236. 15. Wilson E. Strand, "In Search of Assyrian Sense of Humor," in 5000 Years of Popular Culture, ed. Fred E. H. Schroeder (Bowling Green, Ohio: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1980). |
