Despite nearly universal recognition of the important relation between American politics and popular culture, the fact that law is an obviously significant part of the political system, and the fact that lawyers are, perhaps, America's preeminently political profession, very little has been written (by lawyers, law professors, or social scientists) on the images that Americans have constructed of law and lawyers as mediated through the institutions of mass culture.' Lawyer (or other law-related) roles have remained among the most powerful and overrepresented occupations on prime-time television series,2 and pictures of the legal system have been communicated extensively through the of popular culture (e.g., movies, best sellers, soap operas, television news, advertising, pop music, jokes and stand-up comedy routines). Yet these vital signs of American attitudes toward the law have been largely ignored by both legal scholars and the bar. This essay, which concentrates on a relatively narrow range of popular culture formats (primarily movies and novels), is designed as a very modest effort to remedy this state of affairs.3 My analysis imposes one possible framework on popular culture's treatment of or discourses about crime, legality, justice, social order, civilization, private property, civic responsibility and so on.4 I have used three antinomic pairs, or binary oppositions, concerning the relationship of American lawyers to (1) virtue, (2) money or power, and (3) order. Each pair