The American Legal System in the US Popular Culture

Abstract

Popular culture, like law, is an integral component of society. Cultural texts, like legal ones, consciously or unconsciously, deliberately or inadvertently, proclaim the rules and customs that define the social ecosystem and shape the dominant ideology. It would not be a serious exaggeration to claim that in their degree of influence and norm-creation, cultural texts are quite comparable to legal acts and laws, disseminating and enshrining in society certain ideas, attitudes and values. The U.S. judicial system is one of the most frequently represented areas in various formats of popular culture - movies, bestsellers, TV shows, as well as radio, board and interactive games, etc. The legal system and popular culture overlap on several levels, primarily on a substantive level in stories revolving around legal conflict, but also on a narrative level that deploys legal tools, generates meanings and poses problems of argumentation, evidence, credibility, and susceptibility to verification to the audience. This article examines just some of the diverse ways in which U.S. legal and popular cultures intersect. The author employs the traditional method of texts analysis to explore their ideological and semantic content, accuracy and credibility of the depiction, causal connections between fictional and real legal worlds, their mutual influences, and impact on the public perception of law and justice, paying particular attention to popular depictions of the judiciary and its representatives - judges, lawyers, prosecutors, and legal procedures involving them. The author concludes that although fictional images of the legal system are far from always realistic and authentic, they, through dramatization, reduction, accessibility and visualization, have important social functions, such as educational, informative, normative and communicative. Not only conveying, deciphering, interpreting and commenting on concepts, provisions and cases of legal practice, but also criticizing, shaping and changing the legal system as a whole.