Readings In Law And Popular Culture

Readings in Law and Popular Culture is the first book to bring together high quality research, with an emphasis on context, from key researchers working at the cutting-edge of both law and cultural disciplines. Fascinating and varied, the volume crosses many boundaries, dealing with areas as diverse as football-based computer games, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, digital sampling in the music industry, the films of Sidney Lumet, football hooliganism, and Enid Blyton. These topics are linked together through the key thread of the role of, or the absence of, law - therefore providing a snapshot of significant work in the burgeoning field of law and popular culture. Including important theoretical and truly innovative, relevant material, this contemporary text will enliven and inform a legal audience, and will also appeal to a much broader readership of people interested in this highly topical area.

Readings in Law and Popular Culture is the first book to bring together high quality research, with an emphasis on context, from key researchers working at the cutting-edge of both law and cultural disciplines. Fascinating and varied, the volume crosses many boundaries, dealing with areas as diverse as football-based computer games, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, digital sampling in the music industry, the films of Sidney Lumet, football hooliganism, and Enid Blyton. These topics are linked together through the key thread of the role of, or the absence of, law - therefore providing a snapshot of significant work in the burgeoning field of law and popular culture. Including important theoretical and truly innovative, relevant material, this contemporary text will enliven and inform a legal audience, and will also appeal to a much broader readership of people interested in this highly topical area.

This book explores the interface between law and popular culture, two subjects of enormous current importance and influence. Exploring how they affect each other, each chapter discusses a legally themed film or television show, such as Philadelphia or Dead Man Walking, and treats it as both a cultural and a legal text, illustrating how popular culture both constructs our perceptions of law, and changes the way that players in the legal system behave. Written without theoretical jargon, Law and Popular Culture: A Course Book is intended for use in undergraduate or graduate courses and can be taught by anyone who enjoys pop culture and is interested in law.

Commentators have noted the extraordinary impact of popular culture on legal practice, courtroom proceedings, police departments, and government as a whole, and it is no exaggeration to say that most people derive their basic understanding of law from cultural products. Movies, television programs, fiction, children’s literature, online games, and the mass media typically influence attitudes and impressions regarding law and legal institutions more than law and legal institutions themselves. Law and Popular Culture: International Perspectives enhances the appreciation of the interaction between popular culture and law by underscoring this interaction’s multinational and international features. Two dozen authors from nine countries invite readers to consider the role of law-related popular culture in a broad range of nations, socio-political contexts, and educational environments. Even more importantly, selected contributors explore the global transmission and reception of law-related cultural products and, in particular, the influence of assorted works and media across national borders and cultural boundaries. The circulation and consumption of law-related popular culture are increasing as channels of mass media become more complex and as globalization runs its uncertain course. Law and Popular Culture: International Perspectives adds to the critical understanding of the worldwide interaction of popular culture and law and encourages reflection on the wider implications of this mutual influence across both time and geography.

Both law and popular culture pervade our lives. Movies and television shape our perception of law and change how players in the legal system behave. This Book explores the interface between these enormously important subjects.

What can law’s popular cultures do for law, as a constitutive and interrogative critical practice? This collection explores such a question through the lens of the ‘cultural legal studies’ movement, which proffers a new encounter with the ‘cultural turn’ in law and legal theory. Moving beyond the ‘law ands’ (literature, humanities, culture, film, visual and aesthetics) on which it is based, this book demonstrates how the techniques and practices of cultural legal studies can be used to metamorphose law and the legalities that underpin its popular imaginary. By drawing on three different modes of cultural legal studies – storytelling, technology and jurisprudence – the collection showcases the intersectional practices of cultural legal studies, and law in its popular cultural mode. The contributors to the collection deploy differentiated modes of cultural legal studies practice, adopting diverse philosophical, disciplinary, methodological and theoretical approaches and subjects of examination. The collection draws on this mix of diversity and homogeneity to thread together its overarching theme: that we must take seriously an interrogation of law as culture and in its cultural form. That is, it does not ask how a text ‘represents’ law; but rather how the representational nature of both law and culture intersect so that the ‘juridical’ become visible in various cultural manifestations. In short, it asks: how law’s popular cultures actively effect the metamorphosis of law.

This new Second Edition of Law and Popular Culture: Text, Notes, and Questions maintains the most appreciated features of the First Edition published in 2007. Each of the chapters begins with a list of readily available Hollywood films that are relevant to the particular chapter. After an introduction to the study of popular culture and an outline of the goals of the book, the chapters themselves fall into two categories. Half concern the pop culture portrayals of legal institutions and actors -- law schools, the legal profession, clients, witnesses, judges, and juries. The second half concern various areas of law -- Constitutional Law, Criminal Law, Torts, Business Law, Family Law, and International Law. Well over one hundred excerpts from articles by the leading law and popular culture scholars still are included. A majority of these excerpts appeared in the First Edition, but many appear for the first time in this Second Edition. Film remains the most prominent medium. The Second Edition also adds these exciting new features: An original chapter on "Punishment" explores the surprisingly large body of pop cultural works related to imprisonment and capital punishment. Law-related imagery and portrayals in such other media as television, inexpensive fiction, children's literature, and the comics receive much greater attention in the text's notes and comments sections than was the case in the First Edition. Emphasis on the reasons, forms, and ramifications of law related popular culture, moving away to some extent from attempts either to point out the legal errors in popular culture or to teach the law using popular culture.

'Law and Justice on the Small Screen' is a wide-ranging collection of essays about law in and on television. In light of the book's innovative taxonomy of the field and its international reach, it will make a novel contribution to the scholarly literature about law and popular culture. Television shows from France, Canada, the United Kingdom, Germany, Spain and the United States are discussed. The essays are organised into three sections: (1) methodological questions regarding the analysis of law and popular culture on television; (2) a focus on genre studies within television programming (including a subsection on reality television), and (3) content analysis of individual television shows with attention to big-picture jurisprudential questions of law's efficacy and the promise of justice. The book's content is organised to make it appropriate for undergraduate and graduate classes in the following areas: media studies, law and culture, socio-legal studies, comparative law, jurisprudence, the law of lawyering, alternative dispute resolution and criminal law. Individual chapters have been contributed by, among others: Taunya Banks, Paul Bergman, Lief Carter, Christine Corcos, Rebecca Johnson, Stefan Machura, Nancy Marder, Michael McCann, Kimberlianne Podlas and Susan Ross, with an Introduction by Peter Robson and Jessica Silbey.