Customer Reviews

Movies on Trial: The Legal System on the Silver Screen

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This book is completely different than I expected. From its cover and the "official" reviews, I thought that it would be an enjoyable and easy read. It is not. Nonetheless, its analysis-- while not what I was looking for-- is interesting, so I read it anyhow.

Just to give you an idea what you are getting into with this book, here is an extended quotation from Chapter 3: "If Hegel was right, an appreciation for dialectical oppositions can greatly enhance one's insight into the nature of existence, including the experience of historical development and change. Harvard law professor Duncan Kennedy, present at the creation of the critical legal studies movement, wrote a famous law-review article identifying a tension he saw running like a red thread through the history of American law: that between individualism and altruism. Historian Athur M. Schlesinger, Jr., has described American history as a whole in terms of the 'cycles of American politics,' an oscillation in governmental commitment to the public purpose against the private interest. ... Core genres within the culture of American legal cinema can similarly be portrayed in terms of a central and animating contradiction or dialectic specific to each."

Again, not the causal book about how the law has been portrayed in movies like I was expecting. Still, worthy of reading for those with the patience.