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.
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Editorial Reviews
From the Back Cover
Law and Popular Culture combines film history, social history and legal issues in a readable and engaging way. Better still, the course Asimow and Mader propose will help any would-be lawyer to see his or her role in society in a more humane and responsible way. But best of all, this book and this course offers entertainment as well as enlightenment. I never wanted to be a lawyer, but if this course had been around when I was in college, I would happily have embraced it. -Richard Schickel, Film critic, Time Magazine, documentarian, and author of numerous books on film history and criticism.
Law and Popular Culture: A Course Book will become an instant classic. Focusing on exemplary films and television shows about law and lawyers, Asimow and Mader present insightful readings and interpretations of both their narrative and visual elements. This book provides a stellar example of the kind of intellectual excitement that can be generated in the classroom and a truly invaluable resource for teachers and students eager to explore the increasing important connections of law and popular culture. -Austin Sarat, William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Jurisprudence and Political Science, Amherst College, author of numerous works on law and society and law and popular culture.
About the Author
Michael Asimow is Professor of Law Emeritus at the University of California, Los Angeles School of Law. He teaches law and popular culture as both a law school and undergraduate seminar. He has written numerous articles on this subject and is the co-author of Reel Justice: The Courtroom Goes to the Movies. He also teaches contract law and administrative law.
Shannon Mader received his doctorate in Film Studies from the University of Southern California and, until recently, taught courses in film aesthetics, film genre, and American film history at Loyola Marymount University. He is a graduate of the University of California, Los Angeles School of Law.
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More About the Author
Michael Asimow is a visiting professor at Stanford Law School and professor of law emeritus at UCLA Law School. Michael's website is michaelasimow.com and his email address is asimow@law.stanford.edu. He lives with his wife Merrie in Menlo Park, California. He has 6 children and 12 grandchildren. Reel Justice: The Courtroom Goes to the Movies (2d ed. 2006) is a guidebook to all of the great courtroom movies, past and present. Michael edited Lawyers In Your Living Room: Law on Television (2009) which contains informative chapters about all the great legal television shows. Michael also wrote Law and Popular Culture--A Course Book,which is a teaching tool for undergraduate or graduate school classes studying the intersection between law and pop culture. In the area of administrative law, Michael wrote State and Federal Administrative Law with Ron Levin. His treatise California Administrative Law will be published in late 2012.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
An Intellectual Course Book,
By
This review is from: Law and Popular Culture (Politics, Media, and Popular Culture) (Paperback)
Review of "Law and Popular Culture: A Course Book (Politics, Media, and Popular Culture)"
Michael Asimow; Shannon Mader 273 pp. with index; New York, Peter Lang; August 2, 2004 ISBN 0820458155 In the last fifteen years there has been a proliferation of courses in law schools dealing with law and lawyers and their place in popular culture as defined primarily by motion pictures and television programming. Last year, a colleague of mine at the Catholic University School of Law and I began to put together a film course focusing on Hollywood''s view of Lawyers and the lawyering process. We knew that there were law review articles that discussed some of the films we had chosen for the class but not all. Moreover, we could not find a good text that discussed the overarching themes of the lawyer''s place in the culture and how lay people viewed individual lawyers and their work. I called Michael Asimov at UCLA School of Law, who I knew to be one of the gurus in the law and popular culture movement and co-author of Reel Justice, to see if he was aware of a suitable text. I had come to the right place because Mike and a colleague, Shannon Mader, had just completed the manuscript of Law and Popular Culture: A Course Book and he was willing to let me use the book in manuscript form. The book was perfect for our needs. While we did not assign readings from every chapter, we leaned heavily on material that provided a strong rationale for the course, discussed legal education in a way that gave new insights to our students regarding what they were doing in law school and how they will relate to society and presented overarching themes tying together and analyzing particular movie genres such as lawyers as villains (chapter 4); unethical law firms (chapter 13) and lawyers as vehicles for social messages (chapter 3). Helpfully, the authors intersperse real world relevant information and observations in boxes throughout the text. This work provided the intellectual backbone for our course and encouraged the students to view the chosen films and the legal profession in the broader context of our society and culture. The authors can take a bow for their contribution to the understanding of law, lawyers and lawyering. I recommend this text to any instructor teaching a course involving legal films or television series involving attorneys. Harvey L. Zuckman Ordinary Professor and Former Director, Institute for Communications Law Studies Columbus School of Law The Catholic University of America LL.B. NYU School of Law, 1959 A.B. University of Southern California, 1956
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Law and Popular Culture, mistitled yet momentous,
By
This review is from: Law and Popular Culture (Politics, Media, and Popular Culture) (Paperback)
We used Law and Popular Culture as one of several texts in an undergraduate class I am taking entitled, "Law and Society." If the prospective buyer of this text is interested in its substantive content, then he or she should be forewarned that Law and Popular Culture should, more appropriately, be entitled Law in Films. Though its authors acknowledge the pervasiveness and varied nature of popular culture as a whole in their "Preface," including in this designation "films, television shows, books, songs, advertisements, and numerous other imaginative texts," they choose to focus solely on films--13 specific films, to be exact. That being said, the book is incredibly informative, as Mr. Doherty attests, for students of either film or of law. More important, Law & Popular Culture would serve any student of both law and film particularly well, as its authors' critiques of its thirteen films are made with an interdisciplinary acumen.
The book is divided into three major sections: "Law, Lawyers, and the Legal System," "Criminal Justice," and "Civil Justice." In each section, chapters focus on a particular theme and explore said theme by way of analysis of a particular movie, likewise headlining the chapter. Thus, Chapter 3, "Lawyers as Heroes," explores the hero character of Atticus Finch in the chapter's assigned film, To Kill a Mockingbird; Chapter 4, "Lawyers as Villains," limelights the film The Verdict, and so forth. In this way, the text is structured such that an instructor could easily create a course with Law and Popular Culture as its primary text, showing or assigning each of the thirteen movies that Asinmow & Mader analyze, which each headline a specific theme. The downside to this, as other reviewers have mentioned, is that the text is somewhat useless to a reader who has not previously viewed the movies that Law and Popular Culture considers. Moreover, for the creation of a course that actually intends to delve into law and popular culture as an overall theme, Asinmow & Mader's work is lacking in that its analysis is not complemented by an overarching synthesis on the subjects of its title. Included in most chapters are snippets of historical data surrounding the creation of the film, tangential discussions of related historical figures, and technocratic terminologies relating to film production. While Law and Popular Culture does not completely serve the purposes of a student of law as it is portrayed in popular culture, these tangents provide a meager substitute for broad-based analysis of popular culture's portrayal of law as a whole by providing a brief and detailed window into the popular culture surrounding the creation of a chapter's headline film. All in all, Asinmow's and Mader's text is one of significant synthesis with a misnomer for a title, as it at worst adequately and at best wonderfully explores specific films with law-related subject matter.
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
A Useful Book for a Niche Group,
By Seth B. Doherty "sdoherty" (Tacoma, WA/Colorado Springs, CO/Somewhere) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)
This review is from: Law and Popular Culture (Politics, Media, and Popular Culture) (Paperback)
Review of "Law and Popular Culture: A Course Book (Politics, Media, and Popular Culture)"
Michael Asimow; Shannon Mader 273 pp. with index; New York, Peter Lang; August 2, 2004 ISBN 0820458155 A student can take away a lot from this book, whether they are a student of film or a student of law, but sometimes the information presented in this book will only interest a student of one or the other. I recommend it for students who are interested specifically in the intersection of law and culture, but are deeply engaged in both, who have a desire to consider both issues related to filmmaking and specifics of the law. As an undergraduate political science student, I found the discussion of law in the film specifically useful. Yet, I found some of the descriptions of filmmaking techniques mildly interesting, rather technical, and not wonderfully useful for my purposes. For example, in the second chapter, the authors discuss long takes and deep focus in Anatomy of a Murder. This did not seem particularly useful to me. Though film students may find this section useful, they might not find the extended sections on law as useful. These sections are able to be more detailed as one of the writers, Michael Asimov, is a Professor of Law and the other, Shannon Mader, is a scholar of film. Since this book provides information for students of two different studies, the book in its entirety will only apply to a small niche of students, but is still a useful source for students of either field. The authors thus divide the book into short numbered sections throughout each chapter. This has its pros and cons, since it helps the reader pick out that from the book that may be of interest to them, but it also gives the book a disjointed feel. It lacks flow as it quickly moves from one barely related section to another. An overarching argument of a chapter is sacrificed for breadth and diversity of information. Each chapter emphasizes a specific film that fits the topic, such as Anatomy of a Murder for "The Adversary System and the Courtroom Genre," or Philadelphia for "Civil Rights." One gets a lot less out of the chapter if she or he has not seen the related film. There are thirteen different films and it is likely the reader will not have seen all of them. Hence the reading experience will be much enhanced if the reader is using the book with a class where the films will be shown or if the student has access to the films. There is a good deal of fascinating material in this book that may not be closely related to the topic, but is worth reading and becoming engaged in. Specifically, sections of race in film and the section on the Hays Code are interesting in ways not necessarily connected with the intersection of popular culture in the form of film and law. Some readers may see these as tangents, but I found them as quite useful, even if distantly connected and not fully addressing the issue at hand. This book is a useful resource, but mostly useful for a small niche of students. If you are interested in both law and filmmaking, than this is a book should check out, especially if it is connected through a class that will let you view the films as you go through the films.
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