INJUSTICE IN FILM?
Evan Kanarakis

Hollywood's Representations Of Law And Lawyers In Film Through The Years.

'ALL LAWYERS ARE SCUM
...Justice? That's not even an issue here....
' prosecutor in The Onion Field (1979).

It seems that in most forms of popular culture, but perhaps most notably in film and television, law and lawyers continue to be one of the most 'overrepresented' occupations in the media.¹ This certainly isn't a recent development, nor necessarily a surprising one. After all, the profession plays such a central role in most societies. This central role doesn't mean for positive representations, however. Over the years, themes addressing law and lawyers more often than not have been concerned with portraying a lack of virtue, an inability to restore order, and the negative intersection of money and power. Present, but scarcer, are those representations dealing with the positive outcomes which may, potentially, grow out of conflicts of law.² Perhaps today these kinds of more 'scandalous' themes simply make for good, commercially viable entertainment, and yet well before Shakespeare wrote: "The first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers", Spaniards were muttering the old proverb that "A peasant between two lawyers is like a fish between two cats". Such observations can be found throughout history and into ancient times.

Regardless, given today the power of the film and television medium, it is interesting that in the face of overwhelmingly negative and often inaccurate depictions, there are some in legal circles that have voiced concern. They argue that these representations might potentially harm not only the profession itself, but people's own understandings of the law and legal process as a means of recourse and securing justice and fair outcomes.

'YOU'RE MAKING US LOOK BAD
Law and Lawyers On Television
...All my life I kept trying to go up in society. Where everything higher up was legal. But the higher I go, the crookeder it becomes. Where the hell does it end?...
'Michael Corleone, The Godfather, Part III (1990)

To be fair to those making films and television shows, their primary goal is to entertain. The often dull specifics of law and legal process don't naturally lend themselves toward engaging drama, nor does the medium of film and television offer the scope in which to do so. Inaccuracies which often accompany representations of law and lawyers are generally a by'product of the writer's preoccupation with presenting drama and story over strict reality.

The popular Perry Mason program of the 1950's,1960's and early 1990's, for instance, operated on a fixed formula. This was a formula by which the lead character, a lawyer, never had a client who lost, despite the fact he never conducted any library research, formal discovery or practiced law...... save for the preliminary hearings where he always extracted a confession from the guilty party, while District Attorney Burger raised evidentiary objections such as, 'irrelevant, and immaterial, your honour'."³ This formula was repeated in countless other television shows and continues today, because the very nature of entertainment demands that legal disputes be, at times, simplified into easy win'loss scenarios.⁴

Still, it is completely acceptable that these inaccuracies may occasionally (with respect to a discerning public) encourage misconceptions. In the 1970's, amidst the success of such law'related programs as The Fugitive, Kojack and Barney Miller, one study in the United States examining fifteen police programs during a week in March, 1976, found twenty'one cases of police violations of suspects' constitutional rights, and fifteen cases of police harassment and brutality.⁵ Who could knew that Kojack's lollypops were really a sinister device with which to extract confessions when used in a 'certain' way?

Generally, the law programs emerging since the 1980's have been softer on depictions of, in particular, police corruption, and have made stronger attempts at accuracy, but there are still notable deficiencies.⁶ The 1980's program L.A Law, for instance, recognised as being responsible for a tremendous surge in students seeking to pursue studies in law, still glamorised lawyers who were able to succeed in streamlined cases that showed little of the large bulk of work necessary to present a case or of the kinds of legal issues which lawyers routinely address.⁷ This situation obviously repeated itself in the more recent successes Ally McBeal and The Practice. As one commentator described, L.A Law subtracts "... eighty to ninety'nine percent of lawyers' real work lives and emphasises the remainder. It compresses and distils. It exaggerates and conceals.'⁸ Whether working in the fictional McKenzie'Brackman firm (L.A Law), or Cage/Fish & Associates (Ally McBeal) these television lawyers are always fortunate enough to be handling cutting edge cases which most law firms would only dream about tackling over the space of five years, let alone in the course of one high'rating season.⁹

While we should continue to remind ourselves that such flaws are merely the product of efforts at entertainment, and that we shouldn't be leaning to film and television for our education of the law and lawyers, the impact of such representations in popular culture are undeniable. In the United States, lawyers of a dubious nature began to be referred to as 'Arnie Beckers' after one of L.A Law's more unscrupulous characters.¹⁰ In 1987 seventy'three percent of children surveyed in the United States could not identify any differences between judges depicted on television and those in real life.¹¹ Some legal practitioners feel that programs on television such as the courtroom drama have even had an effect on how witnesses conduct themselves, thus creating complications and affecting trial length. In one example from the 1970's, the Dallas District Attorney maintained that a juror had decided to let free an obviously guilty robber as the prosecutor had relied on eyewitnesses to establish the guilt of the accused, and not fingerprints. Since the juror had seen that in every robbery conviction he had witnessed on television the thief had left fingerprints and this had not been proven, he reasoned that the man must have been innocent.¹² If practically all of the crimes shown on television are solved successfully amid an inconsistent mess of glamorising some aspects of the legal profession (including the police) and at other times criticising it, then surely a receptive public is receiving mixed messages and perhaps forming inaccurate conclusions and assumptions about the work, ethics, honesty and overall character of an individual involved in the law.¹³

But aren't lawyers all scumbags, anyway? It isn't a stretch to presume that an industry focussed on conflict resolution is likely, at some point, to generate ill'feeling. In turn, when ill'feeling in the public generates negative depictions in the mass media, these depictions can serve to encourage further cynicism and negativity toward the legal profession. Add the occasionally corrupt or ambulance'chasing lawyer into the mix and matters can only get worse.¹⁴

FROM LEGENDS TO DRUNKEN RATBAGS & MONEYGRABBERS' Law and Lawyers In Film to the 1990's
...Sworn in by a fool and vouched for by a scoundrel. I'm a lawyer at last....
'Rudy Baylor, The Rainmaker (1997)

In film, representations of law and lawyers have generally been similar to those on television. 15 Particularly in the United States, the image of the archetypal defender' the protector who will stand by his or her client against the world and no matter what the odds' was a common, romanticised character in popular culture since the days and spirit of the American War of Independence.¹⁶ The first major appearance in film of this honest, heroic lawyer came in John Ford's 1939 production, The Young Mr. Lincoln, starring Henry Fonda. Though the story itself was based on myths surrounding Lincoln's earliest experiences as a lawyer (which is, in itself interesting to note), the story presented a strong, positive image of the determined young patriot lawyer who would rather die than see his nation shamed by injustice.¹⁷ Whilst other similar representations of law and lawyers did exist during this period (including Nicholas Ray's 1949 Knock on Any Door, starring Humphrey Bogart), it was not until some twenty years later that the image of the virtuous lawyer would become more popularised and integrated into films. Instead, the more common depiction of lawyers was of what became known ...the shyster lawyer... who, with money and power as the motivating goals would put the community at risk by getting murderers off. The classic and perhaps most memorable example of this was the corrupt, high powered attorney Arthur Bannister (played by Everett Sloan) in Orson Welles' 1948 Lady from Shanghai.¹⁸

These negative portrayals of lawyers had emerged out of the depression era and popular notions that lawyers had been acting selfishly in concert with corporations and property owners to exploit the less fortunate and shape the law to suit only themselves. As Anthony Chase has described:

...... the extreme importance of money in America, coupled with 'the mass of failure' that is the underside of striking it rich left Americans with powerfully ambivalent feelings about their dogged pursuit of dollars, an ambivalence that contributed to the positive versus negative imagery through which Americans perceive the legal profession....¹⁹

Disillusionment with the profession had a long'lasting effect on the negative characterisation of lawyers in film, establishing many of the stereotypes which still exist today.²⁰

Despite the strength of such stereotypes, the late 1950's and 1960's saw the emergence of a large number of positive portrayals of the law and of lawyers in film. In these instances the films certainly seem to have reflected changing attitudes in society, as well as the events and upheaval associated with the period, and included Anatomy of a Murder (1958), Twelve Angry Men (1957), Judgement at Nuremberg (1961), and To Kill A Mockingbird (1962). The combination of the decline of McCarthyism and the rise of the civil rights era in the United States brought into sharp focus the issue of the protection and extension of civil liberties, and there was a welcome return across all forms of popular culture to the image of the virtuous lawyer who is capable of restoring order.²¹ Needless to say, from a technical perspective, the specifics and intricacies of the lawyers' work and of legal process were always subservient to the aim of providing good drama and entertainment, first and foremost. In Twelve Angry Men, for example, the effective drama surrounding the attempts by one juror to convince the other eleven to change their vote from guilty to innocent ignores jury studies which tell us that a single hold'out generally has very little hope of bringing others around.²²

Order was a strong theme in many films that continued into the 1970's, however the tension created by news of widespread police corruption in the United States, the Nixon Watergate scandal and the disillusionment accompanying the decline of the civil rights era often meant that portrayals of law and lawyers were generally negative, and emphasised the role of the rugged hero who would use any means necessary (whether legal or not) to 'fight the system' to secure some kind of 'street'justice'. At best, these characters would have only a grudging respect for the system.²³ This theme was at the heart of whole genres (including the Westerns and so'called 'blaxploitation' films of the late 1960's and early 1970's), but was also presented successfully as representations of fact, most notably in Serpico (1973) and All The President's Men (1976). ... And Justice For All and Kramer vs. Kramer (both released in 1979) made strong statements about the intersection of money into the law in the former, and the hostile, divisive intervention of the law into family lives in the latter. The impact of these films must surely have been devastating in maintaining the public's faith in the legal system. It is little wonder, perhaps, that in 1967 one United States survey found that up to one'half of all victims of crime were so disenchanted with law enforcement that they no longer even bothered to phone the police. These figures may surely have intensified into the 1970's.²⁴

By the end of the 1970's, in the aftermath of the disappointments and scandals which accompanied that decade and so clearly affected images of law, lawyers and justice in film, the only palatable return to the virtuous hero'lawyer stereotype could be Paul Newman's alcoholic and bankrupt lawyer in The Verdict (1982). The central plot and themes were not particularly unique 'they could well have been lifted from the 1950's' however, Newman's character Frank Galvin was just as disillusioned with the law as his audience might well have been, and his desire to win his last case and escape his demons was also an important attempt at a reconciliation which might restore his (and the audience's faith) in the law after the disappointments of the previous several years.²⁵

Representations of law and lawyers in the 1980's were largely a broad mix, concentrating on themes which further emphasised restoring faith in the law (such as 1987's A Dry White Season), whilst also reverting again to negative depictions, as in The Star Chamber (1983). These inconsistencies are certainly due, in part, to the rise of intensive Hollywood commercialism in the 1980's, as well as the fickle nature of the entertainment industry itself, rapidly producing films with tired stories that are made purely for quick financial success. Exceptions to this included a number of insightful attempts at depicting contemporary, and at times true accounts of legal conflicts (Judgement in Berlin and The Accused, both 1988). The decade was most notable, however, for the emergence of female lead roles as lawyers in motion pictures with varying degrees of success from the unbelievable and reprehensible (1985's The Jagged Edge) to the formulaic but nonetheless agreeable (Suspect (1987), and Music Box (1989)).²⁶ This development helped to improve some of the inequality that had obviously existed in the representation of male versus female roles in films about law and lawyers.²⁷

IT'S EITHER THE RETURN OF THE HERO OR SATAN HIMSELF, AND NOT MUCH IN BETWEEN'
Law and Lawyers in Film from the 1990's to the Present
"Law and love are the same 'romantic in concept but the actual practice can give you a yeast infection"
'Ally McBeal (1997)

What, then, can be said of lawyers in film in recent years? We can certainly find examples of both positive and negative representations, and thematically, today's films are almost identical to those of twenty or thirty years ago, although the subject matter has obviously changed.²⁸ At some point, however, there emerged a trend in Hollywood to make far more honest and accurate attempts at films dealing with the law and, at the very least, it must be conceded that technically many of today's motion pictures make a more concerted effort towards maintaining some degree of legal accuracy.²⁹

From one perspective, after the success of television programs such as L.A Law in the 1980's, audiences were far more receptive to films dealing with law as its subject matter, and this has been clearly reflected in the overwhelming popularity and financial success of the films based on novels by lawyer'turned'author John Grisham.³⁰ Grisham relies heavily on the 'virtuous hero'lawyer' image as well as other lawyer stereotypes, and his success has prompted Hollywood film studios to consistently cast major stars in his roles, including Tom Cruise in The Firm (1991), Denzel Washington and Julia Roberts in The Pelican Brief (1993), Kenneth Branagh in The Gingerbread Man (1997), and Dustin Hoffman in Runaway Jury (2003).

Films about the law since the 1990's have mirrored developments within our culture. The increased litigiousness of American society (particularly against big business) has been reflected in Disclosure (1994), Grisham's 1997 film, The Rainmaker, and Erin Brockovich (2000), as has been the alleged abuses of law and of power that accompanied Clinton's Presidency and a post 9'11 world (Wag The Dog (1997), Primary Colours (1998), The Insider (1999)). Other motion pictures have shown a keen sensitivity for both contemporary and at times extremely complex legal issues, including child sexual assault (Sleepers (1996)), the death penalty (Dead Man Walking in 1995, and Grisham's The Chamber, in 1996), and sexual discrimination (Philadelphia (1993)). Just as many of these issues may well have never been tackled thirty or forty years ago at law, the same can be said for the representations of such controversial subject matter in film.