Jamail Center for Legal Research
Tarlton Law Library

     My father was a hard-working man who lived within his means and wanted little. The one thing he did want was a new car. I was six years old when my mother acquiesced, and dad bought a sleek new green '51 Pontiac with an ember-colored Indian hood ornament. The year of the new car-1951-was memorable: I started first grade; my father drove the new Pontiac off a Mayfield, Kentucky car dealer's two-car-showroom- floor, and we began to frequent the local drive-in theaters. (These were the days before we had our first TV.) My favorite outings were the all-night shows, the first movie beginning at dark, and then, movies till daybreak.¹ To get through an entire night of movies required pillows and popcorn, a cooler of RC colas, and sandwiches we brought from home so we could save money by staying out of the snack bar. 
     It was at local drive-in theaters that we saw Demetrius and the Gladiators,²The Robe,³ and The Ten Commandants,⁴ movies selected not because we were so deeply religious, but because these Biblical epics were lavish productions of dramatic stories (stories made no less attractive to us because they had Biblical settings). Westerns were also popular in that era. Bad Day at Black Rock,⁵High Noon,⁶ and Shane⁷ all premiered at the local drive-in theaters; they were sufficiently popular that we had to get to the 

drive-in early to get a decent parking place. 
     In 1954, I finally managed to see a film in a real movie theater. My uncle, Barney Thweatt, who everyone in western Kentucky knew as a member of the famous Brewers basketball team that won the Kentucky State Championship in 1948, took my brother and me to his barber in Murray, Kentucky. Then, after our haircuts, he decided to take us to a movie. Even now, I have a distinct memory of the velvet darkness in that Murray theater - my first theater - with lush violet curtains being pulled back to reveal the screen, that magic of feeling so perfectly small and so fully alive to the world unfolding before me, a world both fictional and real.⁸ In the fifty years that followed that magical afternoon watching Johnny Guitar (1953),⁹ the world - fantastical and real - has continued to unfold before me. 

     Professor Philip Meyer, a film buff and law/film scholar, in one of his early film pedagogy articles, tells the reader: 

     By avocation, I am a long-time film junkie and closet-screen writer. By vocation, I have worked with "criminals" in the prisoners' rights office of a public defender and taught creative writing at a state psychiatric facility for criminals. I have always been fascinated by the stories of criminals. Consequently, I selected films [for a "popular storytelling" course] with the theme of the outsiders' perspectives on law and society.¹⁰

anchors appear, not so thinly disguised, in the teaching of a lawyer-film course.
     As a graduate of western Kentucky's drive-in theaters, I became a regular filmgoer at about the time I set out to become a lawyer attending real movie theaters in Lexington, Kentucky, and Greensboro, North Carolina, and then in Washington, D.C., Newark, New Haven, and Chicago, finally moving to West Virginia, but spending several summers watching films in San Francisco and Berkeley. In the 1970s and 80s, I watched hundreds of films,¹² but I never considered myself a film buff in the sense described by my friend, Phil Meyer. What I did, over the years, was to begin to use films in my courses.¹³ What I had in mind to do with lawyer films, as with other texts I sought out, was to find a way to better understand the work we do as lawyers, the meaning of our professional lives.¹⁴ 

     I did not, after watching many movies over many years, with memorable and intense pleasure, take up the teaching of lawyer films with the idea that I had a method or formula for talking about films, or the lawyers portrayed in them; I was not at all sure what we might learn about ourselves from lawyer films. Basically, teaching lawyer films was, even as a confirmed filmgoer, pure pedagogical adventure.¹⁵ I had no idea, in teaching a law-film course, what was to be done, how to do it, or how students might respond. 
     But there is a context to my not knowing what was to be done with lawyer films. In a series of courses (and essays about the courses I teach), I have focused on the way students become lawyers and in doing so, how students adopt a legal mind-set and take up a legal persona and a practical philosophy about the legal work that becomes a part of their identity. Creating, teaching, and writing about these "professional socialization" courses,¹⁶ I have always assumed that it is the sentiments, sensibilities, rhetoric, and philosophies we adopt and enact as lawyers, as much as it is a knowledge of law, that determines the kind of lawyers we will be (and determines how one becomes one kind of lawyer rather than another). If, indeed, it is sentiments, philosophies, rhetoric, and identity that give a lawyer's life shape and direction, we are still left with the central question - "What does it mean to be a lawyer?" - a question central to the implicit curriculum we find in legal education. When we teach to, with, 

and against this implicit curriculum, we need the kind of texts that make it possible to investigate the meaning question, to make it a serious part of one's education. 

     After years of hesitation, I finally decided to teach a Lawyers and Film course and was immediately faced with a decision: What films do I teach? It was neither a practical nor an inviting task to review every lawyer film I had seen, and I had no desire to watch films that I would soon thereafter watch again with my students; I needed a different way to select the films. 

     With the hope that remembering a film, its characters, and its story would provide a benchmark for the pedagogical value of the film,¹⁷ I rather quickly assembled a working list which included: A Few Good Men;¹⁸ Anatomy of a Murder,¹⁹ . . . And Justice for All,²⁰A Time to Kill,²¹ 'Breaker' Morant,²²Class Action,²³Kramer vs. Kramer,²⁴My Cousin Vinny,²⁵Nuts,²⁶   Paris Trout,²⁷Philadelphia,²⁸Primal Fear,²⁹Suspect,³⁰The Accused,³¹The

Client,³² The Good Mother,³³ The Incident,³⁴ The Last Wave,³⁵ The Music Box,³⁶ The Verdict,³⁷ To Kill a Mockingbird,³⁸ and True Believer.³⁹
     It was from this list of lawyer films, which I remember so vividly, that I began making a selection of films for the course.⁴⁰ I had little trouble in deciding to include Anatomy of a Murder, The Verdict,⁴¹ and To Kill a Mockingbird⁴² - three of the best lawyer films (all adapted from novels) - and while I knew students would have likely seen The Verdict, and perhaps To Kill a

Mockingbird, they were far less likely to have seen Anatomy of a Murder. 
     I then made a first-round of cuts from the working list. I removed 'Breaker' Morant from the list, even though it is a fine film, with the idea that I might use it at some later date in a jurisprudence and film course.⁴³ I recalled strong performances by Richard Dreyfuss and Barbara Streisand in Nuts, but had little memory of what role the lawyer actually played in that film.⁴⁴ I decided not to use Kramer vs. Kramer, where the lawyers play a significant but brief role - the film's central focus is on a father learning to cope with raising his young son.⁴⁵The Good Mother was dropped for much the same reason: lawyers simply play a limited (although not insignificant role) in the film. The Incident, a film rarely mentioned in the legal film literature, is a surprisingly good made-for-TV film about a small-town lawyer, Harmon Cobb (played by Walter Matthau), appointed to defend a Nazi prisoner of war against murder charges in the years following World War II. Cobb is taken by surprise when he finds that his client needs a real 

defense.⁴⁶ The Incident was not readily available for pre-screening, so I rather arbitrarily decided not to use it in the course. There were still other films - Philadelphia, The Client,⁴⁷ and True Believer⁴⁸ - which are of interest as lawyer films but are not sufficiently engrossing that I would take much pleasure in rewatching them with students. My Cousin Vinny is great fun, and a teachable film, and I considered including it because I wanted a comedy or two in the overall lineup. However, I decided not to include My Cousin Vinny because so many students have seen the film, many of them, more than once. I placed Suspect on the initial course list because, unlike many reviewers, I rather liked Cher's performance as the lawyer, Kathleen Riley. I used Suspect the first time I taught the course, and it evoked a lively discussion, but Kathleen Riley's involvement with a juror, Eddie Sanger (Dennis Quaid), who provides crucial assistance in Riley's efforts to defend her client, was such a flimsy plot development that I later dropped it from the course film list. I considered using The Accused but decided I had suffered enough the first time around and did not relish the thought of revisiting the painfully graphic depiction of gang-rape in the film. The Accused, for those venturesome enough to teach it, could be a worthwhile addition to a lawyer-film course.⁴⁹

     The final line-up of films for the course distilled down to the following: A Few Good Men, Anatomy of a Murder, . . . And Justice for All, Class Action,⁵⁰Music Box, Paris Trout, Suspect, The Last Wave, The Verdict, and To Kill a Mockingbird. 
     After teaching the course the first time, I began to consider new lawyer films as they appeared - The Devil's Advocate,⁵¹ The Sweet Hereafter,⁵² Liar, Liar,⁵³ The Rainmaker, The Winslow Boy,⁵⁴Snow Falling on Cedars,⁵⁵The Castle⁵⁶ - and older films, like Adam's Rib,⁵⁷ when they came to my attention. Adam's Rib is a particularly good film with spirited performances by Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn, both lawyers, whose marriage is threatened by Amanda Bonner's (Katharine Hepburn) resolution to take up a female client's criminal case (and the cause of women in general), a case prosecuted by her husband Adam Bonner (Spencer Tracy).⁵⁸ The lineup of films, as the course evolved over several 

years, was: Adam's Rib (1949); Anatomy of a Murder (1959);⁵⁹ . . . And Justice for All (1979); Class Action (1991); Paris Trout (1991); The Castle (1999); The Devil's Advocate (1997); The Last Wave (1977); The Music Box (1990); The Sweet Hereafter (1997); The Verdict (1982); and To Kill a Mockingbird (1962). 
     There is, of course, nothing sacred about my evolving list of lawyer films. My basic criterion was simple: to select films that presented lawyers as central, memorable characters, and in doing so, would present us with stories worth talking about. While there are any number of excellent legal films that raise issues about law, order, and justice, I selected the films that left a lasting impression, films with lawyer protagonists that might prompt exploration of the relationship of our professional and personal lives. And, of course, I had no objection to using films associated with acclaimed novels and films that had received critical attention.⁶⁰

     I worked out the course mechanics quite by accident. For the several years I had considered teaching a film course and was hesitant to do so, the basic reason was that I could not quite figure out the logistics for the course. How is one to assign a film that runs two hours and have any time, or energy, to discuss it? Or for that matter, after watching a film, who has any desire to have the lights go on, and then launch into an academic discussion of what has just been viewed? And if the film being discussed is not to be viewed and discussed at the same time, then when is the film to be viewed? 
     In an adventurous mood, I thought of beginning the film course with a film instead of the usual commentary about the course, but eventually bowed to the more conventional tactic - talking about the nature of the

course, the films selected, how the selection took place, the need to find a way to talk about the films and the lawyers we find in the films, the possibility that we might try to use the films to learn something about ourselves, and finally, the obstacles we might face in trying to work with films. With the infinite elasticity that accompanies such introductory remarks, my commentary on that first meeting of the first offering of the course - the class met once a week from 6 to 9 p.m. - left us just enough time to watch the evening's film.⁶¹ With the evening growing late, facing a room of tired students, I decided to hold off discussion of the film until the following week. The next week, we discussed the film we watched the first evening and watched the film assigned for that week. And it was by this rather fortuitous accident that I established a routine, which I continue to use in teaching the film course.⁶²
     By showing a film one week and discussing it the next, I found that whatever is worthwhile talking about in a film is still fresh in memory a week after seeing the film (just as the films I selected for the course were remembered in some detail, years after they were first viewed). A memorable film leaves a residue of significance, which can be explored days and weeks (perhaps even months) after the dust of first viewing settles. 

     Law students, relentless in their pursuit of a practical education, expect everything - and I do mean everything - they study to be relevant to the work they expect to do as lawyers. They listen to our claims on behalf of jurisprudence, legal history, legal ethics, and the various courses we present to them with the goal of broadening and deepening their education, with skepticism, if not disdain. The study of law may have always been a practical enterprise, but it is now a practical endeavor so solidly and thoroughly critiqued that we cannot claim ignorance about the cost of our practicalism. We have seen sweeping changes in legal scholarship over the past quarter century - a "greening" of legal scholarship might be a way to describe it - but legal education is still infected by a practicalist virus.⁶³

     How, in the prosaic, practicalist world of legal education and its "skills training," can we hope to convince a law student that something worth knowing might be learned from watching lawyer films?⁶⁴ Compiling a list of lawyer films and working out the course mechanics is one thing, but of more fundamental importance is the question: Why teach these films? In my case, teaching lawyer films provided another venue for taking-up the professional socialization questions that had long influenced my teaching.⁶⁵ In an effort to give my teaching (and my life as a teacher) meaning, I have continued to seek out new texts (and courses within which to teach them), texts and courses that encourage students to reflect on the array of skills and sensibilities necessary for a meaningful life, and I've sought out texts that might help us understand the pathologies that undermine a meaningful life. 
     Some teaching colleagues place their faith in the explicit curriculum and in skills training. Yet, these same colleagues must know that what a student learns, how it is learned, and how that learning is transformed into a professional identity is shaped not only by the law school's explicit curriculum but by the student's involvement with legal education's implicit curriculum. Lawyer films provide an opportunity to focus on this implicit education.⁶⁶

     A lawyer-film course may seem to be an odd, out-of-the-way place to focus on skills of reflection and to pursue questions about the meaning of life, and perhaps it is. While the lawyer films I selected were designed as entertainment,⁶⁷ a film, to bring credit to its director, further the career of the actors who appear in it, and make a profit for its producers, must also present viewers with a dramatic story that captures their attention. Basically, what is sold to us as entertainment turns out to be not only entertainment, but a dramatic story; we can put these dramatic lawyer stories to use in legal education. 
     In watching a film, we expect to witness something extraordinary, something special, out-of-the-way, unusual, perhaps even something perverse or grotesque,⁶⁸ or something that speaks to the unspeakable.⁶⁹

      Lawyer films present us with stories that are simultaneously ordinary entertainment and stories worth studying because they are craftily composed⁷⁰ fictional worlds that suggest the possibility not only of an evening of escape⁷¹ and entertainment, but a way of getting us beyond what we already know (and the determined ways we act on what we think we know). Films, the best of them, take us up close to what can only be described as mystery. 
     We seek compelling stories - and as lawyers become involved in and must learn to tell such stories - because we are pushed, shoved, and dragged into an unfolding future that can be claimed only as we confront obstacles and endure arduous struggles. There seems to be, in both life and film, an alchemical quest, to transform the banality of everyday life into a life worth living in a world in which truth and justice sometimes prevail. Put most boldly, compelling stories, the stories to which we are drawn and those which repel us, "matter, and matter deeply, because they are the best way to save our lives.”⁷²

     Legal films tell stories made dramatic by invocation of our sense of justice and injustice.⁷³ From the time of the Greek tragedies, we have found justice - justice betrayed and denied, justice sought and vindicated - as a central element of drama.⁷⁴

     In lawyer films, we find lawyers pursuing justice (or standing in the way of it) as they deal with clients, judges, other lawyers, and people in the community. We identify, if we have any sense of humanity and empathy, in a deep, fundamental way with those who have suffered injustice and with those who work to see justice done. Our identification with film characters is secured and deepened by the serious, real, debilitating obstacles we (and the characters in the film) confront in our (their) quest for justice. A quest made all the more perilous because we know that the just do not always prevail; the quest for justice can break your heart. 
     Lawyer films expose us to justice as tragedy, justice that we know is hard to come by, and justice of the most ordinary kind we know from personal experience and from the communities where we live. 

     An essential part of the meaning we give our lives as lawyers is the identity we "take-on" when we become lawyers and the struggle to make this "taken-on" identity fit with who we imagine ourselves to be. Law provides an arena in which the struggle with socially sanctioned identity is worked out. Lawyer films provide one of the "theaters of conflict" in which we try to understand "essential aspects of humanity and society.”⁷⁵ We use lawyer films to help "articulate" and help us understand "the sprawling, ill-understood conflicts"⁷⁶ in which we find ourselves enmeshed, the conflicts 

that underlie the on-going quarrels we have with ourselves, our work, and our profession. 

     The reason for teaching lawyer film is simply this: we need vivid, compelling representations of lawyers in action (lawyers seeking justice and lawyers blind to the injustice they bring about), to explore and re-imagine the ongoing, unfolding, relentless, sometimes heart-breaking, and fateful struggle to give professional life meaning. We need cinema lawyers (and fictional lawyers) as subjects and as stories, not to study who they are, but to learn more about who we are. Lawyers in film and in fiction become part of the rich storied world in which we try to imagine, think, act, and live a role, but a role in which we bring who we are as a person to the work we do, and a life in which the work we do gives the person we are a meaning it could not otherwise have. Simply put, lawyers in film teach us who we are and what we become when we do what some lawyers will do. And, of course, film lawyers teach us about perennial, ultimate questions: How is law enacted? What is the relationship-a most troubled and troubling one-between law and justice? How can an individual lawyer stand against the power of the "system"?⁷⁷ How are we to understand and live with the reality of individual failure? How are we to live (and to act) in the face of law's failure? How does law (as a lawyer lives it and as an ideology) blind us to the larger reality in which it is embedded?⁷⁸ To explore these questions we need stories that help us focus on the meaning dimension of professional life. 

     If narrative is central to law, as it is now widely assumed to be, then lawyer and legal films may, as Professor Phil Meyer suggests, provide a "unique mechanism" for "critical reflection on the dynamics of legal 

cultural storytelling.”⁷⁹ In a film course, we create a new jurisprudence of lawyering and we do it by studying legal minds and legal culture reflected in the stories being told about lawyers and their culture, stories in which we find represented the various identities (and pathologies) taken on by lawyers. 
     Teaching lawyer films also allows us to reflect on a cultural phenomenon - lawyers and law have never been more prominently featured in popular culture (television, movies, novels, journalistic accounts in newspapers, and radio talk-shows) than they are today.⁸⁰ With the scholarly 

attention now given to popular culture⁸¹ and the emerging scholarly focus on law and film,⁸²  lawyer films are of particular interest to legal educators who focus on the "implicit curriculum" by which students prepare themselves for an imagined "real world." We turn to the "fictional world" of lawyers in film as a source of vivid images, memorable stories of conflict in which protagonists fail and triumph, and through these stories we begin the study of ourselves and our identity as lawyers. With lawyer films, we turn our attention to the implicit law school curriculum and engage in a pedagogy of self-learning, looking to see if we can find mirrored in the film what we most want and most fear in being a lawyer.⁸³

     We should expect our students to encounter obstacles when they read lawyer films just as they encounter obstacles in reading judicial opinions, novels, or poems.⁸⁴ If we do not expect students to read films so they can write academic film criticism or law review style commentary,⁸⁵  then the student standing "before the law"⁸⁶ must find a way - a new way - to work with lawyer films, a way which focuses on the identity, role, and persona of the lawyers encountered in films. 
     Students of law, like lawyers and law professors more generally, often suffer serious failings as film readers. Their failings are two-fold: they bring both too little and too much to a lawyer film. When the legal-trained student or lawyer watches a film, they are often trying to escape law rather than confront it. Consequently, they assume that the ultimate purpose in watching a film is pleasure, not education. The typical law student says, 

I watch films for pleasure; indeed, I am taking this Lawyers and Film course simply because I love movies. I do not want to destroy that pleasure by subjecting every film I watch to heavy-duty interpretation. I watch lawyer films for fun, for entertainment. In this course, I would like to escape the relentless drumbeat of the traditional law school course, not re-encounter it in a new guise. 

a lawyer film as a text that can prompt critical self-engagement and self-study, as a text that might prompt reflection on lawyers and their work. 
     A second obstacle is the knowledge that lawyer films are produced by the Hollywood film/culture industry. The politically savvy student says, "Lawyer films are a product of the Hollywood film industry and aren't intended as prescriptions on how to be a lawyer or how to practice law. You have to remember these films are made for mass audiences; they are made to generate big profits." And it is true enough that films are made for money by a culture industry; the films I use in course remind us, in not so subtle ways, that they are Hollywood films. By focusing on the Hollywood source of the film, the student discounts the film as a text that can be read for educational purposes.⁸⁷ 
     There is still a third obstacle for the legal-trained viewer of lawyer films, perhaps the most pernicious of all. As legal insiders, law students and lawyers often focus on the legal accuracy of a film, while ignoring the film's larger meaning.⁸⁸ When I ask a student, "What do you see in this film?" She typically replies, "The most obvious thing I notice about this film, and about TV shows involving lawyers, is how inaccurate they are. Lawyer movies don't come close to reflecting the reality of trial litigation, and they are even worse when it comes to depictions of ordinary legal procedures." Law-student insiders (and knowledgeable film critics of 

whom we expect better) constantly critique lawyer films for legal inaccuracies and for their unrealistic depiction of the legal profession. Lawyer films, in this view, are simply failed documentaries; it is the assumed role of the insider to remind us how useless it is to seek meaning in a Hollywood lawyer film when the film cannot even manage to get legal procedures right. 
     Considering these obstacles to critical engagement with a lawyer film, how can those who are legally trained get beyond the idea of movies as entertainment? If we cannot get beyond these obstacles, lawyer films cannot be texts worthy of serious reading and study. 

     We might begin a study of lawyer films by asking our students to remember their first efforts in reading cases. Legal education begins with the most fundamental of enterprises-reading judicial opinions. Students who do it well, succeed; others learn it well enough to survive, and still others never really master the art of reading cases at all. In watching lawyer films, the student is being asked to "read" a different kind of text and like learning to read judicial opinions, it takes some re-adjustment. Some students may find that they never become adept at reading films. 
     As we focus on reading, we become more aware of the way we read, and strategies for reading that get us beyond first impressions (the film is "good," the film is "bad," the film is "realistic" or "unrealistic").⁸⁹ The way we get students of film beyond simplistic reading is to reflect on the strategies we have in place for understanding a particular film, and how those strategies have helped or hindered our response to the film.⁹⁰ But the question about strategies is so intricately related to the question - "Do lawyer films have meaning?" - that it can be hard to sort out which comes first: the meaning or the strategy. And if films do have meaning(s), where 

does this meaning come from? How can it be articulated? How can the meaning(s) we derive from the film be made a part of our education? How is it that some students of film get rather good at this exploration for talk while others flounder? 
     Some students are quite agile and adept at reflecting on their reading (or in this case viewing) strategies, seeking out new ones, and open to criticism of old strategies. Some students are simply more curious and open to new texts (and new genres), texts with which they may have had little experience, or texts which seem to offer no obvious paths to follow. A student, open and curious about the unfamiliar in film, or the glossy surface of a film, may eventually be able to translate this curiosity into new strategies for learning.⁹¹

     I have often entertained the fantasy that the right text⁹² needs no teacher; it teaches itself.⁹³ My students have tried to dissuade me of this notion,⁹⁴ but I still hold to the idea that a text often contains internal markers (strong clues) as to how it can be read (indeed some texts are rather dictatorial in this regard). These markers or clues allow a knowledgeable, persistent reader to figure out how the text can be read and put to use.⁹⁵ 

     It was the idea that texts teach themselves, both explicitly and implicitly, which I translated as: look first to the film.⁹⁶ I want students to learn to make use of what they find when they "read" the film: memorable scenes, striking dialogue, courtroom speeches, recurring symbols, music (that sets a mood and heightens our attention),⁹⁷ the camera shots that take the viewer into the courtroom,⁹⁸ and more basic still, the always ever-present story. 

     James Boyd White, a "law and humanities" scholar, says, "I read for an education.”⁹⁹ Viewers of lawyer films might use White's statement to frame these questions: What kind of education does this film make possible? What kind of knowledge of lawyers, the legal profession, and the world does the film offer? And, what view of the world and lawyers and law does this film offer that is not so readily found in the world of law and lawyers presented to me as a student of law? 

     We read lawyer films best when we think of them as stories. We have 

been listening to stories, telling stories, and reading them from the time we were children, so we must know something about stories. We undoubtedly know more stories than we know about stories. Watching lawyer films involves us in stories we know and stories we do not know, and they challenge the knowledge we assume we have about stories¹⁰⁰ and the deep structural prototypes that we use to organize them.¹⁰¹ The problem arises when we learn that the stories we know and what we know about the stories is not so easily put to use. 
     One pleasure found in watching films comes from our involvement in a carefully (if not always wisely) crafted story. Film stories are peopled with vivid (often unforgettable) characters, men and women of different habits and sensibilities who must contend with (and rebel against) the situations and settings in which they find themselves. The drama in lawyer films comes from an encounter with what Will Wright, writing about the Western film genre, calls "different kinds of men.”¹⁰² In the West, as in Western films, we find "farmers, cowboys, cavalrymen, miners, Indian fighters, gamblers, gunfighters, and railroad builders.”¹⁰³ The setting today where we are most likely to find many "different kinds of men," and the place where the stories of these different men and women are being told, is in the courtroom. In a courtroom trial, a lawyer is required to defend (and prosecute) decisions and actions (and in doing so, various ways of life). And it is not just the situational antagonism of the plaintiff and defendant,¹⁰⁴ who by way of some prior relationship have seen their dealings go bad, but it is also the very real difference in the men and women who act as courtroom advocates and storytellers for the plaintiff and defendant-the lawyers-that we find still more relevant for our education as lawyers. And we may, in a lawyer film, find that the party least likely to have a personal stake in the fight-the judge-is still another kind of man or woman whose 

adherence to or deviance from his role becomes a situational antagonist along with the the lawyers and the parties to the conflict. 
     Imagine the camera capturing this familiar courtroom setting: a raised stage with the black-robed judge sitting behind an elevated bench with an open space before him, and two massive wood tables eight or ten feet apart at which are seated the lawyers waiting their turn to address the court, to strut and pose before the jury.¹⁰⁵ The camera carries film viewers into the courtroom to watch the assembling of the legal actors, to watch one of the lawyers questioning a witness, and then pans to the jury box and the faces of the twelve jurors listening intently. The camera moves in now to focus on the lawyer questioning the witness. The witness appears confused, bewildered, a look of fear making its way onto his face, as he is asked questions which the viewer knows he cannot possibly answer truthfully, his evasive answers suggesting his untruthfulness (an untruthfulness exposed by the skills of the lawyer). 
     Wright, in his instructive study of the Western film genre, frames a prototypical lone rider scene in the Western and finds in it the "familiar setting" by which "social and moral meanings" of the Western film are conveyed. 

A lone rider, sitting easily in the saddle of his dusty horse, travels across the plains toward a small, new town with muddy streets and lively saloons. He wears a tattered, wide-brimmed hat, a loose-hanging vest, a bandanna around his neck, and one gun rests naturally at his side in a smooth, well-worn holster. Behind him, the empty plains roll gently until they end abruptly in the rocks and forests that punctuate the sudden rise of towering mountain peaks.¹⁰⁶

asserting it by resorting to the legal system. Something important to someone is at stake, something serious and valuable. There is, in the political rhetoric of the day, loose talk about "frivolous lawsuits," but that is not what we find presented in the law suits and the courtroom scenes in lawyer films. 

     If we could live free of conflict, tension, and the fault-lines that underlie human existence, we would have less affinity for stories than we do. And without stories, the film industry would go the way of the small family farmer. Conflict is as central to drama, as drama is to story, and as story is to life. Our lives are connected to lawyer films by way of story, drama, and conflict. 
     To understand the stories in our lives and our films, we need a better understanding of conflict and the various ways in which we struggle to understand the "great opposites": good and evil, order and disorder, love and hate, success and failure, individual and society, past and future, modern and primitive, masculine and feminine, imagination and reality, profane and sacred. If these oppositional forces in our life create tension and conflict, and we identify ourselves by the way we struggle with these "great oppositions," then lawyer films provide us with crude maps of these oppositional forces and our struggle with them. Lawyer films play with, and play against, the tensions between and within the "great opposites.”¹⁰⁸
     Lawyers work with conflict, traffic in it, and make their living from it. And, as a result of being so closely associated with conflict, we sometimes produce it. In a lawyer film, we can "follow the conflict" the way prosecutors in white-collar crime investigations are told to "follow the money.”¹⁰⁹ The conflict(s) we find in a film must be placed in perspective,

both in the film and beyond the film, in the world we inhabit. 

To be able to participate vicariously in stories about characters who play out possible lives, confront possible situations, who have moral conflicts and who must make choices, is to learn such truths about life, not through personal experience but through a kind of super experience-that is, an experience that one might never be able to have oneself, except through the story.¹¹⁰

[We] must ask what these oppositions "represent," . . . what they "symbolize." This aspect of interpretation involves connecting the singular oppositions of the text to the generalized oppositions that structure our cultural systems of values [] . . . . Considered in this light, interpretation is not a pure skill but a discipline deeply dependent upon knowledge. It is not so much a matter of generating meanings out of a text as it is a matter of making connections between a particular verbal text and a larger cultural text, which is the matrix or master code that the literary text both depends upon and modifies. In order to teach the interpretation of a literary text, we must be prepared to teach the cultural text as well.¹¹³

"the critic's recognition of her or his own values.”¹¹⁴ We use binary oppositions to read a text, to think critically about it, to deconstruct it;¹¹⁵ we use the oppositions to recognize our own ideals, and our own limits. In reading the film's critical oppositions, we put the film to use. 

     Reading a film requires students to identify with the film's characters, to become engrossed in the life of a film character who has burdens to bear, threats to confront, and obstacles to overcome¹¹⁶ - a character asked to learn something about himself and his world.¹¹⁷ In seeing the film character learn, we, in turn, learn something about ourselves. 
     There is something odd, peculiar, and wonderful about the knowledge we come to possess about film characters. We may know where a character lives, what kind of furniture she has in her bedroom, the kind of car she drives, her marital and family situation, where and with whom she works, what kind of work she does, how she is regarded by her coworkers, her relationship with her boss, how the boss is regarded in and out of the office, and the various tensions and conflicts created by her work.¹¹⁸ I know more about many lawyer film characters than I do about most of my real world colleagues, some of whom I have worked with for twenty-five years! 
     We learn enough about film characters - those portrayed with subtlety in a well-written film - to become briefly, but intensely and intimately involved in what we know to be fictional lives. Involved with the character, the character becomes a person we begin to care about; we want things to 

turn out well, and we want the character (who becomes a peson to us) to get what he or she desires because of what we have learned about them. We want for film characters what we want for ourselves.¹¹⁹ Entertained by plot, we are educated by the film's characters.¹²⁰

     James Boyd White notes that "the activity of law is inherently idealizing.”¹²¹ There are many ways to idealize and many ways to imagine the life we live. In film stories, we see how an imagined life actually works, and in particular, a life that we can think of as heroic. It is in a limited subset of images of lawyer and of self, in the deep imagining and fantasizing of legal work, that we find the myth that sustains us.¹²² 

     We need not expect law students to admit that they have set out to be heroes or expect them to readily see the heroic in their quest to survive the rites of passage in becoming a lawyer.¹²³ Yet, it would be a mistake to underestimate the effect that the lawyer-hero image - Clarence Darrow, Earl Rogers, F. Lee Bailey, Percy Foreman, Edward Bennett Williams, Louis Nizer, Gloria Allrud, Gerry Spence, and the lawyer heroes we find in fiction and film - have on our efforts to imagine ourselves as lawyers. Our lawyer heroes (arrogant egotists and humble alike) tell us something we want and need to hear  -that a lawyer's work is at the heart of things, that legal work has meaning. To live with the fantasy that life has social and cultural significance is to posit an ideal and to set out upon a worthy quest. The stories of lawyer heroes and their quests is one way that myth (and heroic consciousness) is made "real." 
     The myth of law exercises a gravitational pull on our lives, on our sense of self, on our politics, and our culture. The mythic resonance of lawyer stories is most obvious in stories where lawyers use law and their skills as lawyers to speak truth to power, and stand up to a community as Atticus Finch does in To Kill a Mockingbird.¹²⁴ The stories of lawyers and how they stand against those who abuse power - a story found in films like Erin Brockovich, A Civil Action, The Incident, And Justice for All, A Few Good Men - are central to the myths we carry with us as lawyers.¹²⁵

     The stories of our most authentic lawyers - we call them heroes - contain a crucial insight into the problem of truth confronted by the amorality and immorality of power: the insight that we may lose and falter, but, in doing so, we live a life of hope. For example, in To Kill a Mockingbird, Atticus tells his son, Jem, after the jury conviction of Tom Robinson, that he is tired, but not bitter. 
     Atticus is not defeated by the social injustice perpetrated by the jury and Maycomb's racism because he knows that the community has failed itself, and that it is diminished by its failure. Atticus also knows that his life - along with the lives of his children - is in Maycomb, and that he must make a home for himself and his children and must live with those who do not share his vision of social justice. In making a worthwhile life in communities that fail us, as Maycomb fails Atticus, we experience the reality of failure and the power of an ethical vision to sustain us in troubled times, in troubled communities. 
     Yet, we go on. Robert Cover in his celebrated work on narrative jurisprudence suggests that each of us has an inner life, and from the existence of this inner world we create an imagined world, a world in which we can make psychological commitments to ourselves and others, a commitment to truths that express our deepest ethical sensibilities.¹²⁶ These private commitments play a fundamental role in social transformation. "[P]owerful, expressive movements of the inner life may," Cover argues, "have revolutionary potential.”¹²⁷ The revolutionary potential of an imagined world must be realized in a history that chronicles failed heroes, inflated expectations, and misguided visions. It is such a history, which "corrects for the scale of heroics that we would otherwise project upon the past.”¹²⁸ In suffering heroic failure, we lay the grounds for a future in which power recognizes truth. The image of the hero is fundamental to becoming a lawyer. I do not think it a dramatic overstatement to suggest that we are each, in some way, touched by a sense of the heroic. 

     If there is a predominant recurring theme in legal film scholarship, it emerges from the misguided notion that lawyer films fail both the legal audience and the larger public because they portray lawyers negatively¹²⁹ - constantly focusing on unethical lawyers - and they are simply not realistic.¹³⁰ The corollary of this view is that lawyer films are little more 

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than mass entertainment, an entertainment that is dangerous for both the profession and the public.¹³¹
     Film commentary which calls for more realistic portrayals of lawyers is basically misguided.¹³²  We can begin to explore the legal accuracy/unrealistic portrayal critique of lawyer films by asking: Do we have as predicate for watching any film that it must portray the "real world"?¹³³ We go to movies for entertainment, to get away for an evening, to escape, and more importantly, we watch films to become absorbed in and engaged by a story, a story made hyper-real by visual images, stage craft, music, and the setting in which the film is watched. The quality and lasting impact of the film - and the value of the film for pedagogical purposes - is not found in its realistic portrayal of a world we already know; rather, pedagogical quality is found in viewing a fictional world that can become, for a few hours, a substitute for our real world. What we learn, and what we take away from this substitution of a fictional world for the real world is sufficiently complex that it becomes easily lost in the demand that lawyer 

films realistically portray lawyers. 
     In response to the legal accuracy/realistic school of lawyer film criticism, we are confronted with the need to be clear about what lawyer films are and how they might serve as instructive "texts." Nancy Rapoport points in this direction when she notes: 

The discourse of film is based on many things, but it is most decidedly not based on Hollywood's deep understanding of law and lawyers. In fact, Hollywood knows very little about lawyers or lawyering. That's not surprising: the business of Hollywood is film, not law (or medicine or history or science fiction). All that Hollywood needs to know about law, in order to go about its business, is how law can fit into the conventions that make up the world of movies. Those conventions force the discourse of film to filter most of "real" law out, leaving only the most cinematically interesting parts. Those parts include the drama of the trial, the compelling image of the lawyer-hero, and the equally compelling image of the lawyer-devil.¹³⁴

of lawyer films is that Hollywood represents law as "an epic form.”¹³⁸ Shale goes on to outline a way of thinking about film-making and film narrative that might help us sort through the conventional indictment of lawyer films as being legally deficient: 

First, we must consider the narrative conventions that structure the paradigmatic Hollywood movie, shaping it into a tale of heroic odyssey. Second, we must look at the way in which a screenwriter creates a story from the life-stuff of events. In asking how a story emerges, I am asking how the writer creates a meaningful, thematic narrative rather than an inconsequential, flat recitation of occurrences. Third, we need to turn our minds to the problem of plot - that is, how the meaningful story is presented to the audience as a series of discrete events. Having found a meaningful story in the life events, the screenwriter must still establish a satisfying way of telling it.¹³⁹

• What "narrative conventions"¹⁴⁰ do we find in the lawyer film and what do they tell us about lawyers that we might want to make a part of our education? 
• Of what value to us, and to the public more generally, are the "tale[s] of heroic odyssey"¹⁴¹ we find in lawyer films? 
• If a screenwriter "creates a story from the life-stuff of events,"¹⁴² how are we to navigate the delicate/crude relationship between "the life-stuff of events"¹⁴³ and the fiction presented to us in the film? 
• What kind of "story emerges"¹⁴⁴ when we become lawyers and how is this emerging story related to the fictional stories of lawyers we find in films? 

• How does a story, those we live and those we see in films, become a "meaningful [and]     thematic narrative"¹⁴⁵ in contrast to stories which are an "inconsequential, flat recitation of occurrences"?¹⁴⁶ 
• How is a "meaningful story,"¹⁴⁷ in film and in life, to be presented to an audience? 
• Can a "satisfying way"¹⁴⁸ be found to tell the stories we want to tell? What makes for a satisfying film lawyer story? 

     Finally, I want to turn to the notion that lawyer films portray lawyers in a negative light and in doing so are anti-lawyer.¹⁴⁹ Do the legal film critics who focus on the strikingly negative images of lawyers in film have grounds for concern, if it is likely, as a fellow amateur film critic noted, that you can find screen lawyers selling their grandmother in order to get a conviction? My argument is simple: the negative portrayal of lawyers in films presents no great danger to the legal profession because we misread the meaning of the portrayals. 
     Let me begin with the comments of deX (this is his web signature), a controversial participant in a web "film-philosophy" forum in which I participated before I began teaching the film course. It was deX who made the comment about screen lawyers who sell their grandmothers to secure a conviction. When I raised a question about the conventional view in legal circles that lawyer films were anti-lawyer, it was deX-who as you will see is no fan of capitalization - offered an interesting layperson's view of the situation: 

ultimately, i think that most popular legal films do not simply offer us the "sell your grandmother" view. rather, in an attempt to acknowledge the populist conceptions of corruption etc., and somehow defuse and demythologize [law]  . . . [read "damage control"]: they start with grandmother sales as the negative against which a positive alternative of the triumph of true justice is achieved by following the changes undergone by a romantic and ideal character who is usually nothing short of pure ethix on legs [in the flesh]. in such dramas the Law, more often than not, is constructed as the ultimate instrument for true change and the best place to make a real difference despite corruption. . . . 
in my experience what most people walk away from a legal drama pic or tv series thinking is not that lawyers sell their grandmas, but that law is simply interpretation-there are those who interpret it for their own selfish means and those who interpret it in such a way as to reinvent the world into a better place for all.¹⁵⁰ 

     In the conventional criticism of lawyer films, legal critics have begun to sound like doctors who talk about lawyers but using a doctors-on-lawyers "script." The problems that confront medical doctors are quite real, but pressed as they are for quick-fix solutions, we can predict what most doctors are going to say about medical malpractice and insurance before they say it. We have developed "scripts" of a similar sort in the legal community. One of our "scripts" reads: the public does not think so highly 

of lawyers (and we are repeatedly reminded of this); as members of the legal profession we worry about this public perception; we fear that the public perception of lawyers has a negative impact on our work and our profession (and the "rule of law"); and finally, we fear that the negative representations of lawyers in film and fiction fuel the negative public perception of lawyers. The problem with this "script" is that it fails to take into account the historical ambivalence of the public about lawyers,¹⁵² and it offers no explanation as to how the public's negative perception of lawyers might affect the relationship of lawyers with clients, or how the public perception of lawyers impacts the legal profession more generally. We do not know how the negative public perception works, and we do not know how to evaluate the meaning of the perceived perception (whatever it may happen to be).¹⁵³

     In contrast to the legalist/realist film critics - shall we call them "policing critics" - who warn us about the negative portrayal of lawyers in film, there are few lawyer films without lawyer protagonists with whom the viewer can be expected to identify. Whatever the public may think of lawyers, however they derive and make use of their knowledge of lawyers from popular culture, and whatever the polls may show about the disdain of lawyers, this negative public sentiment cannot be blamed on Hollywood and its films. If we are to blame Hollywood for the woes of the legal profession, then how do we explain the presence of so many heroes in lawyer films?¹⁵⁴ We might assume that the public response to lawyer heroes and lawyer villains is sufficiently complex, multi-sourced, and historically grounded, that we simply do not, at present, know what elements and aspects of the current negative sentiment can be traced to the negative portrayals of lawyers in film. 
     We see lawyers cast in a negative light, in lawyer films and in life, because they are given an opportunity to walk up to a line that says: Line. Do Not Cross. Do Not Go Beyond. And when confronted with the line - 

the warning - What do lawyers do? Some ask, adjusting their glasses, "What line?" "Do you see a line? I don't see a line. You call that a line? It looks more like a scratch of some kind to me. I don't see any line that I need to be concerned about. The line mentioned in the warning is not this line." And so the lawyer talks, and talks, and talks, erasing the line, talking sophistry. Lawyers learn to walk across the line as if it were not there, acting as if the warning was written in Farsi. Indeed, walking across the line, even as the line is pointed out to them, they proclaim innocence. Every lawyer thinks of himself as Billy Budd, the innocent. 
     Do all lawyers (film or real) take this stance toward lines not to be crossed? No. Are some lines to be questioned? Well, yes, of course they are, and it is the everyday business of lawyers to engage in this questioning of lines. We know, of course, that lawyers take different stances toward lines, to the reality of lines, and to the lines we are all warned not to cross. We know also that some lawyers, whether by way of curiosity, innocence, or willfulness, want to get up close to lines both real and imaginary. More basic still, we lawyers work with lines, we contest them, and we learn how to see that lines get moved (forward, backward, temporarily erased, sometimes erased entirely) because our clients want them moved or because justice demands. We also do this work because we know that some lines have been drawn in a more equitable and just way than others. We should not be surprised that, in working with lines as we do, lawyers learn to get up close to them, drawing near to edges and boundaries. 
     We can expect lawyers to sometimes mistake where the line is and when it can be appropriately moved backward or forward, and when it is being transgressed-with legal approval. Given the nature of our work, this business of lines and line crossing tends to be controversial. Yet, when lawyers in film ignore the rules of ethics to get something they want, or something they think their client wants, legal film commentators howl like stuck pigs about how unrealistic the film is, and how Hollywood traffics in negative images of lawyers.¹⁵⁵
     Some lawyers acknowledge the existence of lines, legal and ethical, personal and professional, and in working the lines, know - at least intellectually - that when true, real lines are crossed, there is a price to pay. Knowing this, we might find of interest, and of pedagogical value, those stories and scripts, from life and from film, that have lawyers getting 

pushed, shoved, and dragged by events, by clients, and by their own ineptness, to cross these lines. (We want to say to them, "Don't you know you'll have to pay a price for this?") 

     What are we to make of crossing lines (mistakenly, negligently, willfully, or wantonly), and the effort it takes to get one's life and legal practice back in order after having found oneself on the wrong side of the line? The thing that makes lawyer films interesting, valuable, and instructive-makes them worth studying, worth trying to understand-is that the film viewer knows, and is intended to know, what the lawyer character in the film seems not to know: that there are lines, that they are being crossed, and that there will be a price to pay for the crossing. We expect lawyer villains in film to be punished, and the pleasure in having this happen is more palpable, real, and psychologically satisfying when we know that lawyers so thoroughly shield themselves from sanction and punishment in the real world. (The film lawyer, far more than the real world lawyer, risks punishment by serving the interests of those who have the wherewithal to pay good money for bad behavior.) If we see justice done in lawyer films, it is all the more satisfying if the justice compensates for the injustice we know to exist in ordinary life. As much as we may desire to see justice done, we do not expect in lawyer films to see every bad act punished, every violation of the profession's rules sanctioned, or good fully rewarded. 
     What lawyer films do manage to do, and do well, is to tell a story. The story has a point and a purpose, and everything in the film must weave the tale, a tale that convinces us that it is a tale worth telling (the best tales are memorable, haunting, disturbing, compelling, and/or puzzling). When we leave a film - the best of the surprising number of good lawyer films - we know we have been told something about how the world works (as the film works on the world). 
     Film viewers know something about the lines lawyers are warned not to cross (even though they cannot claim to be insiders), and they know something about lawyers and about the ethics of lawyers. The film-viewer, is assumed to have a modicum of common sense. Basically, then, based on everything the film-viewer knows, she knows that the lawyer must know the line is there. Yet the line gets crossed, and it gets crossed so readily that we begin to question both the reality (of the film) and the fiction (of the lawyer 

 who crosses the line).¹⁵⁶ It is this ability of the film-viewer to see the line, to read the Do Not Cross sign, and to see the lawyer fail to heed (in film and in life) the warning, that makes for the negative image of lawyers. Film-viewers and people-on-the-street want to ask: Who gives the lawyer the god-almighty power to ignore the lines we know to have been imposed on us (ironically by law and lawyers no less)? Is there, we might wonder, something in the character, the training, and the selection of those who become lawyers that make them unable to see what a legal film-viewer/layperson can see so readily? And how could Hollywood's lawyer films portray this line-crossing in such a deliberate and persistent fashion if lawyers in the non-cinema world - if there can be such a place - do not engage in the kind of line-crossing so vividly dramatized in lawyer films?¹⁵⁷
     If there is a lawyer film genre, and it is part of the genre to have lawyers cross the uncrossable line, then we must focus on the ability of the film viewer to see what the lawyer does not.¹⁵⁸ How is it that otherwise 

intelligent trained professionals can be so blind? And by what measure of magic and character do film-viewers gain such acute vision that they know and see what the lawyer does not? And what do we expect to find in the work of legal film critics who assume the virtue of lawyers as professionals, and point a long-boney finger at each and every violation of a professional norm and ethical rule while naming the number of the rule violated?¹⁵⁹ How does the legal commentator divert our attention from the justice we find in lawyer films, to a justice known only by lawyers and their self-prescribed ethics? 

     To move from abstraction to a specific film, we might consider The Devil's Advocate (1997), a film unlikely to find favor with legal film critics. The lawyer protagonist in the film, Kevin Lomax (Keanu Reeves) is found by legal commentators to be both ludicrous and still a threat to the legal profession. These are the film critics who cannot bear the thought that a lawyer might be associated with the work of the Devil. Kevin Lomax's threat to right thinking about the legal profession¹⁶⁰ is made more serious by the fact that he is young, handsome, married to a beautiful wife, and awfully good at his work. Moreover, Kevin Lomax seems to have a special talent, a way of understanding jurors that makes it possible for him to win what would appear to be unwinnable cases. Kevin Lomax is a lawyer to be envied, so talented that we wonder just what he might be capable of achieving.¹⁶¹ We then learn - as if we did not know already - that Kevin Lomax can be lured, by the promise of his talent, the great reach of his ambition, and the ability of others to see his unfulfilled needs, to cross the line (indeed, several lines) for which we know he must pay a price. 
     What we find in The Devil's Advocate is that Kevin Lomax, by the 

nature of his work, has begun to represent clients that are basically no-good, (clients who are exemplars of evil, for those of us who still believe in the reality of evil). Further, he allows his great talent to be used on behalf of these questionable clients. Lawyers like Kevin Lomax deal with real badness (confusion, poor judgment, weakness of character, as well as social and culturally sanctioned excess); they see, talk, touch, and litigate this badness; in getting up close to it and the fallen world of their clients they are in turn put in danger by it. Should we be surprised that lawyers like Kevin Lomax cross the line, that they metaphorically take sides with the Devil? 
     It is Kevin Lomax's crossing-over, which we are allowed to see and which we see in lawyer films generally, that threatens the stability of our settled views as lawyers and legal film critics.¹⁶² To the great horror of legalist policing film commentators, viewers find this crossing-over entertaining as it resonates with what the public believes to be truth (God forbid) about lawyers-that they can be bought and their advocacy put to use by the Devil. Since Hollywood lawyer films need neither to conform to our conventional thinking about lawyers and the legal profession, nor present lawyers in the celebratory way we most want to be seen, we are spared, in films, the insider's spin. The fear of lawyers and legal critics who warn against a Kevin Lomax story is that we might begin to take it seriously, that the public might begin to think that lawyers do the Devil's work (still more threatening since the Devil in The Devil's Advocate, John Milton - Al Pacino - turns out to be an entertaining, intellectual, and philosophically astute character). 
     The film critics want to tell us, as they tell themselves, that lawyers simply cannot be thought of in the way Kevin Lomax allows us to see them. To protect the good name of lawyers, we need someone to ridicule Lomax as unrepresentative of the legal profession. Since we cannot be the enemy, Lomax must be a character invented by Hollywood to further torment and threaten the (good) work of real world lawyers. 
     That lawyers, in films and beyond films, traffic in the broken, the shady, the false, the fraudulent, and the criminal, while making a good living doing it, is not a well-kept secret. That we do this underground work, and hold so sanctimoniously to the virtue and ethics of a profession, suggests an emperor with no clothes. 
     Working with lawyer films, and knowing something about real world lawyers, we are left with a simple question: Does a compact between a 

lawyer and the Devil make any sense, any experienced (real world) sense, any cinematic sense? We know it has made for some telling moments in The Devil's Advocate (and did so in a film which at times was so over-the-top, excessive, and downright weird that it sometimes threatened the coherence of the film). Kevin Lomax's compact with the Devil made for high drama, and at times compelling drama, even though it may not have resulted in a great film. Is not the compact with the Devil an imaginative context for revisiting the devilish play of good and evil, the good and evil we find in the work of zealous lawyers? Where do the good lawyering talents of Kevin Lomax (and real-world lawyers) end and the work of the Devil begin? 
     In contrast to the legal film police, I think we should appreciate the educational value of lawyer-film villains who are portrayed with all their foibles and warts, lawyers so unethical we gasp at their audacity. Only when confronted with the most profound villainy, can we celebrate raw virtue (most often in the same film, the same drama, and in some instances, the same character who has so vividly and compellingly portrayed the negative elements of our character and our profession). 
     Kevin Lomax, seduced by his own talent and by the lure of a big city law practice, shows us how ordinary it is for talented lawyers to want to push themselves, their talents, their skills, and their lawyering, as far as their endowments can take them. We (viewers) know that pushing on in this way cannot be done without danger. And if there is danger to be risked, let it be Kevin Lomax who takes the far-out trip with the Devil. The film-viewer wants to say to Lomax - "Boy, you've got a talent that's a pretty thing to see, now you be careful you don't let this powerful thing you've got lead you astray." (Ride the tiger, get eaten by the tiger.) Can Kevin Lomax not see that his powerful talents, used indiscriminately and unreflectively, undermine everything that he believes he is? Is it anti-lawyer, or a detrimental negative portrayal of a lawyer, to particularize and give full character to the presence of a talent so powerful that it leads one to sign on for the Devil's work? 

     Lawyer films are not, in their negative portrayals, anti-lawyer, but an opportunity to participate vicariously in the various dramas that upend our lives and render our communities less inhabitable by the day. We would like best to have the great drama of good versus evil finally settled, with evil banished, and the good crowned ultimate victor. Since we can hardly imagine such an outcome, and we know we do not have the skill and power 

to bring about such an outcome, we can expect our greatest dramas-legal and tragic-to be repeatedly restaged in popular culture, and in literature, as they are in daily life. We do not, and the lawyers in film do not, finally prevail over evil by acting virtuously; we enact virtue for its own good, trusting that we might survive to fight another day. To have and understand heroes, film lawyer heroes and everyday heroes, we must know the reality of failure and of tragedy. The lawyers' failure that we see in lawyer films is an inevitable truth, a truth both entertaining and educational. 
     We want lawyers to get close to power, to know its ways and vulnerabilities, to respond to it with knowledge and skill, and to teach us about power.¹⁶³ We want someone, anyone-lawyer, politician, scientist, prophet-who will speak truth to power and, in so doing, fan the spark of hope that we may survive the predations of the powerful. Power opposes truth. Lawyers know this and have the socially sanctioned skills (sometimes misused) to do something other than roll-over in the face of power. It is this standing up to power, confronting it with the tools that have been made available to us, tools specifically placed in the care of lawyers, which makes film lawyers so frightening, so threatening, and so dangerous in their wild disregard for settled and conventional forces of power. 
     The thing about lawyers is that they have the skill and the knowledge, and are socially sanctioned to speak truth to power. When they do it, we celebrate the occasion. When they do it and live to speak another day, we are curious about the strategy by which they manage to survive. When they do it and make a habit of it, we remark on their character. This speaking truth to power is a common motif in lawyer films, and in life (witness our whistle-blowers), and we know that there is often hell to pay for standing toe-to-toe with people who have real power. 
     We know, or should know, that it takes fortitude, even for those trained as lawyers, to speak to power. We cannot expect all lawyers to possess the courage to do it, or that those who may have summoned the courage once will have the capacity to make it a habit (or that those with courage will be the most skilled). Judges can make life difficult for alawyer. Often, the client does not want to hear the truth. Too often, there is no great monetary reward for speaking the truth. We probably should not expect a lawyer to be anymore courageous than the next person, but we do. Courage is neither a routine matter, nor a rare occurrence. It will happen today, at some law 

firm meeting, in some lawyer's office, or in a courtroom; routine or rare, it still seems quite extraordinary. It is this poetry of power-not having it but speaking to it, fearful of it but confronting it, getting close to the thing we do not allow to debilitate us-that makes the work of lawyers so intriguing, so compelling, and such a perfect match for Hollywood films. 
     Lawyers are not trained in American law schools to know anything about power,¹⁶⁴ yet they continue to be fascinated by it.¹⁶⁵ Law students must secretly prepare themselves (psychologically and educationally) for their opportunity to oppose power. In this underground, anti-establishment aspect of their education, law students may come to possess the courage and skill, as well as psychological and communal resources, to do what lawyers - film and real - do. No, it is not a mundane sort of thing to speak in opposition to power (and those who have it). Read the story of virtually any whistle-blower and you find a paradigmatic case of the ways of the powerful. Talk to Anita Hill,¹⁶⁶ or talk to anyone who stands up to power. You hear the same tale: the powerful or their agents will try to destroy you if they cannot corrupt or co-opt you.¹⁶⁷ The powerful use power - a 

notorious truism - and in doing so, leave destruction in their path. Those who are not destroyed by power and the powerful become our heroes. 
     We find in lawyer films a world in which the wild energy of the lawyer represents an elemental form of truth, which stands in opposition to the ways of power and its destructive potential.¹⁶⁸ We watch film (and television) to escape the seething sense of futility and powerlessness we experience in the world we now inhabit. If we realize in watching lawyer films some deep desire to see the powerful opposed, to see them whine and wither as they confront defeat, prompting some nascent hope that the corruption of power can be comprehended and demystified, and from time to time defeated, then we will have found in lawyer films a worthwhile purpose.¹⁶⁹ When lawyer protagonists come to grips with power, either power out in the world or the sense of powerlessness in their own lives, we are touched at some deep place where desire remains unsettled and unsatisfied. In watching a lawyer film we may have learned something from what we have assumed was only entertainment. 

     In law school, we always know where meaning lies - the law is meaning - and sometimes students are lulled into believing that it is law and only law that they want or need to study. For law students, the first task, and sometimes the last, is to know what lawyers know - the law and how to use it. 

     Oddly enough, there is quite early on in the life of the law student, a suspicion and a knowledge that law school cannot be the real thing, if by real we mean something which stands alone, an enterprise to be valued in and of itself. The student comes to grips with what is real (demanding, overwhelming, and sometimes overpowering) by seeing legal education, 

not as the real thing, but as a means to something real.¹⁷⁰ Whether the student is actually benefited or harmed by this way of dealing with the reality of law school can best be resolved by looking at storied accounts of how the student deals with law school. 
     There are distinct differences between the law students who are hell-bent on getting somewhere-and are more than willing to tell the speed with which they want to do it-and those who find law school a perfectly good time to reflect on where they come from and where they now find themselves.¹⁷¹ Both the reflective and non-reflective student must come to grips with the many and varied manifold tasks at hand. These tasks may feel and be experienced as more or less real. Some students are frustrated by the reality of what they experience - a "boot camp of the mind," a "legal monastery," a school for hired-guns, a summer camp for sophists, a haven for non-intellectuals, an ongoing study in the phenomenology of arrogance. Others find in law school a version of reality that makes real learning possible - a new way of thinking, and seeing with greater clarity, understanding how "facts" can be contested, and how law deals with and adjudicates contrasting and conflicting stories. Some students learn that lawyers are managers, makers, and tellers of stories, and that our role in these stories turns out to be a complex one. The student attuned to complexity learns how law and justice (the profane and the sacred) are perceived in the life to be led as a lawyer. 

     We might, with these cursory remarks on meaning and the law student in mind, turn now to the idea of meaning and lawyer films. If we think of a lawyer film as a story to be put to use as a part of one's education, then we might think of the film as a bridge to the future, as well as a way to think about where we have come from. A lawyer film offers a glance at where we are going, and where we have been; it connects the law student viewer 

to an imagined (feared) future, as it reminds us of an imagined (feared) past. 
     And of course, a lawyer film can be an evening's entertainment - $ 7.00 and an evening that allows you to escape your real-world worries, sorrows, and failures. Escaping from what ails you at $4.00 or $5.00 an hour (less than the minimum wage) sounds like a real bargain. We might, somewhere along the way, want to think about the lawyer film as entertainment, how it got to be so, and how it allows us to escape, even as it brings us back around to realities of the mundane worlds we inhabit. 
     If there is a central, thematic message in popular culture studies and film studies, it is this: we should take our entertainment seriously. One of the founders of popular culture studies puts the point this way: 

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.¹⁷²

structuralist, or Marxist, sets up a framework, a structure, a language, and a method of analysis, and in doing so becomes the engine that drives the critique. There are two obvious problems with film theory. First, the text interpreted is "made" or "found" to fit the theory, thus endangering the life, vitality, and meaning of the text. The theory competes with the text for our attention, and often, overwhelms the text being interpreted. The object becomes theory, the text an incident or an occasion for elaborating the theory. The more elaborate the theory, the more endangered the text. Second, while we assume that it is the theory that makes the revelation of meaning possible (and it sometimes does exactly that), we may also find that meaning resists capture by our interpretative theory nets.¹⁷³
     With the admitted practical orientation of the law student (which can be frighteningly ugly in its crudest embodiment), and my own revisionist thinking about the misplaced role of theory, I am prompted to find a different way of approaching lawyer films. It begins with this question: How is this text to be used? What we are doing in law school when we read a lawyer story, or watch a lawyer film, is really quite simple. We are trying to figure out not where the story/narrative/novel/film belongs in an academic study of the text (a placement we may leave to literature and film studies students),¹⁷⁴ but where the text belongs in our lives, its use in figuring out where we are, what we are doing, and where we are going. It is this view of the text, and its place in a law school curriculum, that has us asking: What am I to do with this text, this story, this film? Can I use it? Can I read it so it becomes useful? And, can it be read so that it has a place in what I am trying to learn about myself, about the role I adopt as a lawyer, and about the identity that seems to accompany this? Interpretation in service of use sounds right to me. Interpretation that takes the reader through the theory thicket is just another way to get lost. 
     With this understanding of what I want to do with students in a lawyer film course, I was intrigued by the suggestion of Tim Bywater and Thomas Sobchack in An Introduction to Film Criticism that the basic purpose of 

film criticism is "to increase the possibilities of meaning available in the experiences of viewing and thinking about movies.”¹⁷⁵ Bywater and Sobchack describe a "humanist approach" to reading films of the sort we might undertake in legal education that differs from an academic investigation of film "as an aesthetic, social, and historical phenomenon.”¹⁷⁶ The work of the humanist film-reader is straight-forward (even when it is not simple): "[T]he humanist approach to film attempts to make sense of the individual's emotional and intellectual experience of a film (it always begins with that personal encounter with the work), to draw conclusions about the value of that experience, and then to communicate that value to others.”¹⁷⁷ The question that lies at the heart of the humanistic approach is this: "What can movies tell us about the human condition?"¹⁷⁸ This question spawns a host of others dealing with how weare to get the "ideas . . . hidden beneath the surface of a film.”¹⁷⁹ 
     Bywater and Sobchack find two implicit assumptions in the humanist approach: 

(1) that movies are more than simple entertainment and deserve a backward glance, some extra thought, some writing about, in order for us to understand the experience of filmgoing more thoroughly and (2) that since movies are about human experiences, any human who has some interest in intellectual matters in general can write intelligently about the experience of the movies.¹⁸⁰

where the viewer is invited to make comparisons between the story on the screen and the world in which the viewer exists.”¹⁸²

     As I complete work on this essay, I receive an email message from a reporter for National Jurist, Christine Willard, and she wants to know whether I might be willing to talk with her about my Lawyers and Film course. She is writing an article, she says, about unusual law school courses. I decided to talk with Ms. Willard, but did so in the misguided belief that I might be able to persuade her that Lawyers and Film should not be treated as an unusual course but as an essential one.¹⁸³ Indeed, I would argue that in teaching lawyer films my purpose is rather straight-forward and consistent with the kind of professional socialization and implicit curriculum courses I have been teaching for twenty-five years. Yet, for some reason, the idea of teaching films in a law school sounds unusual. 
     When I say my purpose in teaching lawyer films is straight-forward, I mean, I am exploring questions that are central to a student's legal education, even if they happen to be questions which are not consistently raisedin more traditional courses. How does one get to be a lawyer, and once you have gotten to be a lawyer what does it mean? And, what does it mean in terms of who you are and how you live? These meaning questions and concerns are present - if implied - in everything we do in legal education. That these questions do not appear on the syllabus of most law school courses does not erase them (although it may devalue and discount them in subtle ways when they do get raised). 
     The questions I raise in the Lawyers and Film course are not unusual, at least in my teaching. There is something unusual in the teaching of a lawyer films course only if one finds it unusual to return, again, to central questions of real importance. 

    Legal films suggest a subject matter, if not a genre. But there does seem to be a consensus, at least among legal film critics, that trial or courtroom drama films are likely candidates for genre status,¹⁸⁴ although the genre has not as yet been widely recognized in film criticism literature. We do not as yet have in place a scholarly definition of the legal film genre and I do not plan to offer one here since my focus has not been legal films, but a more limited array of lawyer films, which can themselves be viewed from a genre perspective.¹⁸⁵ In my view, it is lawyer films, rather than the

courtroom drama genre films, that is of greater value to law students.¹⁸⁶ Law schools, as one of their several missions, prepare students for litigation, placing the central mission of law school in competition with the meager technical offerings of courtroom genre films. We may be offering a first level education as a trial lawyer, but law schools do virtually nothing to address the problem of how one is to go about living with the law. 
     Let me present here a preliminary, working thesis, and suggest that there is a lawyer film genre and that we can begin, tentatively, to outline its structural features. Lawyer films, seen from a genre perspective, contain some set of the following structural elements: 

• the film's protagonist, central character, or narrator is a lawyer; 

• the film presents the lawyer engaged in professional work; 
•  the lawyer's work (and the ordinary world in which that work takes place) has been significantly disrupted either by a client's case or cause,¹⁸⁷ or by some feature of the lawyer's work, her life in the firm, or some event in the lawyer's personal life;¹⁸⁸ 
• the ordinary world of the lawyer (which we may find to be "ordinary" only to the lawyer!) is subject to a significant threat (loss of the client's case, or loss of professional status/marriage/family from actions of the client, agents of the client, or sustained loss to the lawyer himself) that threatens the lawyer with disorder;¹⁸⁹ 
• the threat of dissolution, loss, identity deformation, harm must be addressed and is addressed by the lawyer's resort to professional (legal) and personal resources (character); in addressing the threat the lawyer's work and the meaning of that work is at stake (as are other things of value);¹⁹⁰

• the lawyer may, as part of the narrative, be involved in litigation which may result in a significant courtroom drama (and the courtroom drama may play a significant part in the film) or the entire film (story) may lead to the trial and the trial becomes a central feature of the film; 
• the lawyer's work, engagements with clients, and efforts to marshal his own psychological resources require an encounter with substantial obstacles that require something akin to a heroic effort to overcome. 

• When first viewed, the lawyer is: fallen and in disarray (Frank Galvin in The Verdict), the lawyer is a rising star (The Devil's Advocate, A Time to Kill), the lawyer is an existing legal star (PrimalFear, A Civil Action);¹⁹¹ the lawyer is in a mid- or later-life crisis (Anatomy of a Murder, The Sweet Hereafter, Class Action), or the lawyer is neither fallen, nor a star, but bound to the endless world of routine (Suspect, And Justice for All, Adam's Rib, Erin Brockovich). The fallen star characterization is commonly assigned to the secondary/supporting roles in various lawyer films. Secondary/supporting lawyers may be mentors to the protagonist or may betray the protagonist as he/she tries to overcome the obstacles confronted during the course of the film. 
• The lawyer's world - fallen, rising, descending, stuck at mid-life, or stuck in a lawyer's routines - must now be disrupted (by one or a series of events), a disruption that is precipitated by the appearance 

of a particular client/case. The appearance of the client moves the story character from the opening state of affairs (settled or in disarray) and threatens the present order (a threat of a still deeper fall or a hastening of the decline). 

• The fallen lawyer must seek, against opposition and by overcoming obstacles, a more secure place in the world; that is, the fallen lawyer must seek redemption. The path of the rising star must be threatened by obstacles and opposition that block the ascent and threaten a great downfall. The star's place at the top of the heap must be questioned or challenged. A mid-life crisis may loom (if the lawyer has already lost his or her family, then his legal practice may now be at stake). The everyday routine work of the lawyer must in some way become extraordinary, as in And Justice for All, or in Amanda Bonner's decision to take a case in which she opposes her husband, Adam Bonner, in Adam's Rib, or the hostile reactions of a community in A Civil Action, or the hostility of a client in The Verdict. 
• With the lawyer's world and work, and the lawyer's position in this world established, and then threatened, the lawyer having responded in more or less ethically acceptable ways to the challenge, must now resolve the conflicts in which he or she has been placed by the disorder in his or her life. The nature of the response turns on the lawyer's character. The response leads to a resolution and the reordering of the lawyer's world, or to a new life beyond law's reach. 

     To translate the "implicit curriculum" into a set of explicit, practical concerns that might provide guidance for our work in a lawyers film course, I propose the following questions for those who ask: What is this Lawyers and Film course all about? What are we to do with these lawyer films? What is it that you expect us to learn? 
     On Being a Lawyer and Learning about Ourselves: What, if anything, do we learn about lawyers, from lawyer films? And, how are we to go about doing this "learning"? What obstacles do we confront in trying to learn something about lawyers from lawyer films? And perhaps still more important, what can we learn about ourselves from film representations of 

lawyers?¹⁹²
     The "High" and the "Low" (the lawyer as hero and as villain): How are the ideals and the pathologies associated with a life in law portrayed in film? How does the fictional film lawyer help us see and understand the allure of a life in law and to understand that law has a mythic dimension? What neurotic and dysfunctional aspects of character and psyche do we find in film lawyers? And, how do the pathologies we find in film lawyers reflect our own pathologies?¹⁹³
     Clients and Our Relationships with Them: How do lawyers engage and respond to clients in lawyer films? 
     The Lawyer's World: What kind of social world do film lawyers inhabit? That is, what kind of families do they have? To what communities do film lawyers belong and how do they act as members of those communities? What do film lawyers teach us about friendship, loyalty, and betrayal? In what sense are the social worlds inhabited by the lawyer healthy or perverse? How do lawyers create and disrupt the communities they inhabit? 
     Being Critics: How do the lawyers we find in film represent and reinforce particular ideological stances? How do they rebel against law and legal ideology?¹⁹⁴ And, what new critical perspective do lawyer films make 

possible?¹⁹⁵
     The Place of Lawyer Films in Popular Culture: How can we account for the popularity of lawyer films (and lawyer television dramas)?¹⁹⁶ And, is our present preoccupation with lawyers and law in popular culture (lawyer films, novels, TV dramas) a positive or negative element in contemporary society? 
     Lawyer Films as a Genre: Do lawyer films constitute a film genre and if so, how is it to be described?¹⁹⁷ David Chandler, in his Introduction to Genre Theory,¹⁹⁸ poses some questions about genre that I have adapted for students in my lawyer films course: Is there a lawyer film genre? What films suggest the existence of such a genre? What conventions and story patterns are common to the genre? How do these genre conventions shape and constrain the meaning we attribute to such films? What ideological assumptions and values do we find embedded in lawyer films? What "pleasures" do we associate with watching lawyer films? To what audience are lawyer films directed? 
     Study of Film: How does film differ from other media in which lawyers are portrayed (television dramas, Court TV, novels, journalistic accounts)? How do films, and their particular mode of production, affect the portrayal of lawyers? What particular difficulties might one face in reading, interpreting, and understanding the social, political, and cultural messages 

 presented (encoded) in lawyer films? How does film differ from other forms of representation as a medium of instruction and source of cultural information? What elements of film (e.g., story-telling, narrative, drama, mythology, visual presentation, ideological critique) are of particular interest to lawyers? Do students of law (and lawyers) confront particular problems in working with the images of lawyers in film? Can we work with lawyer films in a serious, critical, reflective way without undertaking a study of the various "schools" of film theory?¹⁹⁹ And, can we, by watching 

films, discussing them, and arguing about them, build a strategy for reading films from the ground up?²⁰⁰
     "Reading" Film: The central problem, for the student of lawyer films, can be simply put: How is the film to be read?²⁰¹ What can the film mean to those of us who have set out to become lawyers? And, how can the film be put to use in understanding the professional life I have undertaken? 

     I have never managed to teach a "Jurisprudence and Film" course, but the decision to drop 'Breaker' Morant (Pact Prod. 1980) from the Lawyer and Film course film list set me to thinking about "jurisprudence" films. My working list for the jurisprudence film course now includes: A Cry in the Dark (Warner Bros. 1988); A Dry White Season (Sundance Prod. 1989); A Man for All Seasons (Open Road 1966); Amistad (Dreamworks SKG 1997); Brubaker (Twentieth Century Fox 1980); Cool Hand Luke (Warner Bros. 1967); Dead Man Walking (PolyGram Filmed Entm't. 1995); Dirty Pictures (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer 2000); Falling Down (Warner Bros. 1993); Ghosts of Mississippi (Columbia Pictures Corp. 1996); Incident at Oglala: The Leonard Peltier Story (Spanish Fork Motion Pictures 1992); Inherit the Wind (Comitas Prod. Inc. 1960); In the Name of the Father (Universal Pictures 1994); I Want to Live! (Figaro Films 1958); JFK (Warner Bros. 1991); Judgment at Nuremberg (United Artists 1961); Mad Max (Mad Max Films 1979); Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome (Kennedy Miller Prod. 1985); Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior (Kennedy Miller Prod. 1981); Missing (Universal Pictures 1982); Natural Born Killers (Trimark Pictures 1994); Rashomon (Daiei Studios 1950); Reversal of Fortune (Warner Studios 1991); Snow Falling on Cedars (Universal Pictures 2000); Star Chamber (Twentieth Century Fox 1983); Straight Time (Warner Bros. 1978); The Advocate (Miramax Home Entm't 1994); The Birdman of Alcatraz (Norma 1962); The Green Mile (Castle Rock Entm't 1999); The Insider (Touchstone Pictures 1999); The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence (Paramount Pictures 1962); The Ox-Bow Incident (Twentieth Century Fox 1943); The Paper Chase (Twentieth Century Fox 1973); The People vs. Larry Flynt (Columbia Pictures Corp. 1996); The Shawshank Redemption (Columbia Pictures Corp. 1994); The Thin Blue Line (American Playhouse 1988); The Winslow Boy (Winslow Partners Ltd. 1999); Twelve Angry Men (Orion-Nova Prod. 1957); and Z (Valoria Films 1969). 
     Brubaker (Twentieth Century Fox 1980), Cool Land Luke (Warner Bros. 1967), Dead Man Walking (Havoc 1995), I Want to Live (Figaro Films 1958), The Birdman of Alcatraz (Norma 1962), The Green Mile (Castle Rock Entm't 1999), and The Shawshank Redemption (Columbia Pictures 1994) are films about the death penalty, prisons, prison life, and prison administration. On the portrayal of prisons in film, see Melvin Gutterman, "Failure to Communicate" The Reel Prison Experience, 55 SMU L. REV. 1515 (2002); Teree E. Foster, I Want to Live! Federal Judicial Values in Death Penalty Cases: Preservation of Rights or Punctuality of Execution?  22 OKLA. CITY U. L. REV. 63 (1997); William 

Haltom, Laws of God, Laws of Man: Power, Authority, and Influence in Cool Hand Luke, 22 LEGAL STUD. F. 233 (1998); Roberta M. Harding, Celluloid Death: Cinematic Depictions of Capital Punishment, 30 U.S.F. L. REV. 1167 (1996); Carole Shapiro, Do or Die: Does Dead Man Walking Run?, 30 U.S.F. L. REV. 1143 (1996). 
     On the various "jurisprudence" films set forth in the list, see Carolyn Patty Blum, Images of Lawyering and Political Activism in In the Name of the Father, 30 U.S.F. L. REV. 1065 (1996); Robert Louis Felix, The Ox-Bow Incident, 24 LEGAL STUD. F. 645 (2000); Orit Kamir, Judgment by Film: Socio-Legal Functions of Rashomon, 12 YALE J.L. & HUMAN. 39 (2000); Paul A. LeBel, Misdirecting Myths: The Legal and Cultural Significance of Distorted History in Popular Media, 37 WAKE FOREST L. REV. 1035, 1041-42 (2002); Douglas O. Linder, Salvaging Amistad, 31 J. MAR. L. & COM. 559 (2000); Steven Lubet, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance: Truth or Justice in the Old West, 48 UCLA L. REV. 353 (2000); Marini, supra note 67; Philip N. Meyer, Criminality, Obsessive Compulsion, and Aesthetic Rage in "Straight Time," 25 LEGAL STUD. F. 441 (2001); Nell Minow, "An Idea Is a Greater Monument Than a Cathedral": Deciding How We Know What We Know in Inherit the Wind, 30 U.S.F. L. REV. 1225 (1996); Osborne M. Reynolds, Jr., Review of Cool Hand Luke, 22 OKLA. CITY U. L. REV. 97 (1997); David S. Sokolow, From Kurosawa to (Duncan) Kennedy: The Lessons of Rashomon for Current Legal Education, 1991 WIS. L. REV. 969 (1991); Robert Waring, Z, 30 U.S.F. L. REV. 1077 (1996). 
     Incident at Oglala (Spanish Fork Motion Picture 1992) and The Thin Blue Line (American Playhouse 1988) are documentary films and the decision to include them in a film course based on fictional (commercial/Hollywood) films presents some interesting pedagogical issues.²⁰²
     One might also want to address fact/fiction problems presented by films like A Man for All Seasons (Open Road 1966),²⁰³ Ghosts of Mississippi (Columbia Pictures Corp. 1996), Inherit the Wind (Lomitas Productions, Inc. 1960), and Reversal of Fortune (Warner Studio