Law, Lawyers, and Popular Culture

Abstract

This essay concerns two distinct but related ways in which legal intersects with more general social norms, including those norms reflected in popular culture. In the first place, legal acts as an intervening variable, a mechanism for transforming norms of popular into legal dress and shape. In the second place, legal and popular culture, as images of each other, help explicate and illuminate their respective contents. This essay also examines some instances of popular legal culture. But I will begin with a few words of definition. By legal I mean nothing more than the ideas, attitudes, values, and opinions about law held by people in a society.' Everyone in a society has ideas and attitudes, and about a range of subjects-education, crime, the economic system, gender relations, religion. Legal refers to those ideas and attitudes which are specifically legal in content-ideas about courts, justice, the police, the Supreme Court, lawyers, and so on. (Obviously, one aspect of legal is what problems and institutions are defined as legal in the first place.) The term popular culture, on the other hand, refers first, and more generally, to the norms and values held by ordinary people, or at any rate, by non-intellectuals, as opposed to high culture, the of intellectuals and the intelligentsia, or what Robert Gordon has called mandarin culture.' Second, and more narrowly, it refers to culture in the sense of books, songs, movies, plays, television shows, and the like; but specifically to those works of imagination whose intended audience is the public as a whole, rather than the intelligentsia: Elvis rather than Marilyn Horne.3