Law at the Movies

Abstract

Abstract This book asks the question “How can legal doctrine be turned into filmic art?” By “legal doctrine” I do not mean the sonorous abstractions that usually accompany the self-presentation of law—Justice, Equity, Equality, Liberty, Autonomy, and the like. Rather I have in mind the specific rules and procedures invoked and analyzed by courts on the way to declaring a decision—mail fraud, lawyer–client confidentiality, property law, libel law as applied to public figures, the distinction between interdicted violence and the violence performed by the legal system, the interplay of positive law and laws rooted in morality, the difference between civilian law and military law, the category of class action, the death penalty, the legal definition of insanity, the admissibility of different forms of evidence. In the movies I discuss, these and other points of doctrine and procedure do not serve as a background, occasionally visited, to the substantive issues that drive the plot and provide the characters with choices; they declare the plot, and character is formed and tested in relationship to their demands. Apparently technical matters are pressed until they occupy both foreground and background and become the movie’s true subject. If large, abstract concepts emerge, they emerge at the back end of doctrine and are, in effect, produced by doctrine. These are not law-themed movies; they are movies about the unfolding of legal process. They do not begin with grand definitions of law; they begin (and end) with the details of legal practice in a particular, delimited, legal space. Grand definitions, if there are any, follow.