Movies on Trial: The Legal System on the Silver Screen

By Anthony Chase

The popular culture of American law has never played a larger role than it does today in shaping the way we think about lawyers and the legal system. Our very definition of justice is now inseparable from motion picture and television images and popular legal narratives, from Hollywood westerns and O. J. Simpson to Law and Order and John Grisham. In Movies on Trial , law professor and movie aficionado Anthony Chase sorts out some of the complex and often contradictory notions Americans have about the legal system. He uses movies to investigate and inventory many of our deepest beliefs about law and politics, and provides a strong historical and intellectual context throughout. Analyzing Dirty Harry and True Believer for their commentary on the Miranda ruling and criminal procedure, and explaining tort law via The Verdict and A Civil Action , Chase also employs Three Kings to reveal changes in international law and The Rise to Power of Louis XIV to explore the rise of the modern state. Through the lens of film, he is able to describe and analyze the symbiosis between the image of law and its actual practice in our cultural imagination, in a genuinely illuminating and entertaining book.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1565847008
• ISBN13: 9781565847002
• Release Date: June 2002
• Publisher: New Press
• Length: 204 Pages
• Weight: 0.90 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.9" x 5.8" x 8.4"

Customer Reviews

No Fluff

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.