Peter Robson

Lawyers and the legal system on TV: the British experience

This essay seeks to shed some light on the portrayal of law and lawyers on television. Whilst it focuses principally on the British experience, it is written in the wake of American televisions extensive output and comments on these products. It indicates where the impetus for this work has come from and examines the changes in the portrayal of small screen lawyers. It notes the scholarship carried out in the United States and seeks to build on this pioneering work. It assesses the schemes used by the analysts of American TV law and notes their limited applicability to the British context. It constructs a typology of TV law programmes based on the development of distinctive styles of programming. This typology covers legal procedurals, legal dramas, legal comedies and legal reality shows. It notes the potential for analysis of the development of TV law programmes to shed light on areas such as the globalisation of culture and debates on legal education as well as on the nature and image of the legal profession and its socio-political function. It suggests that this process of mapping out the domain of small screen legal justice requires to be supplemented by detailed readings of the wealth of material which is revealed in the overview of the British experience and complemented by studies in other jurisdictions. It concludes that there seems to be a paradox at the heart of lawyer programmes. The dominant ethos of the vast majority of the material has been essentially reflective rather than refractive. The protagonists have been anti-establishment whilst the underlying trope has been the attainment of justice through the vehicle of the heroic lawyer.

Law and Film: Introduction

What we have brought together in this collection is a selection of contemporary scholarship in Law and Film in a range of jurisdictions. Law and Film has been a focus of the Law and Society Association at its Annual Meetings through the 1990s and has attracted scholars from different backgrounds. We include four pieces from Germany, three from Britain, and four from the United States of America. Inevitably the concentration within most of the essays is, however, on the dominant cultural products of Hollywood. The paucity of material other than American in the area of law films is itself an issue which is addressed in a number of the essays presented here. We have provided a selected chronological bibliography of writing on law and film at the end of this introduction. This bibliography indicates how recent has been scholarly work on law and film and the recent genesis of this scholarship has helped shape the varied nature and style of the works presented here. Not surprisingly there is no consensus about what to look at in law and film nor in what form these studies are best conducted. There is then a variety of approaches to the issue of how film looks at law. Some of the writers in this volume have based their analysis on a wide range of films, whilst others have provided a close reading of the work of either a particular era, film-maker or writer. The interests and paradigms the writers adopt include social theory, literary theory, and film studies. Further, a number of films recur within the essays and are the subject of analysis from these distinctive perspectives. We welcome this diversity which is inevitable in a field of scholarship that seeks to cross traditional boundaries. There are a number of strands of inquiry which have emerged in this collection. Three principal areas can be identified. The collection looks at the nature of the films produced portraying law and lawyers. The essays look at the significance and impact of these law films on the public perception of law and the legal process and the influence on the practice of law itself.

Fade to grey: portraying the ethnic minority experience in British film

Abstract This paper is principally concerned with a matter which does not appear to have received much attention in the literature, namely the representation and adaptation of the ethnic minority 1 experience in film. These issues have, for the reasons explained below, only appeared in a limited way in British popular culture. The imperial and inter-cultural experience of race has appeared in a variety of forms over the years. This paper seeks to place this film coverage in its historical and political context. It does this by looking in some detail at how one particular representation of ethnicity in Errol Braithwaites autobiographical To Sir with Love, fared in its adaptation for the screen. A much blander portrayal of race and racism in post-War Britain emerges from the film of To Sir With Love than that of the original literary source with the background of racism largely removed from the film. The paper suggests that to obtain a better purchase on the process of adaptation it is crucial to examine the social and political context within which the films in question are made rather than simply concentrate on the aesthetic and stylistic distinctions between the written source and film 2 as though these are pure processes to be assessed in some kind of artistic vacuum. This examination is premised on the basis that there is significance in examining the cinematic portrayal of such developments. 3

Adapting the modern law novel: filming John Grisham

Concerned with the phenomena of films about law, lawyers and justice. Examines the major theoretical perspectives within which 20th century work on law and film has appeared and analyses the problem of how law films can be classified.

The Impact of Film and Television on Perceptions of Law and Justice: Towards a Realisable Methodology

This chapter examines an issue which has attracted only limited attention in the literature on law and popular culture – namely, the impact of popular culture on public perceptions of law and justice. It examines the context in which the study of popular culture in relation to law has developed and its principal goals and the working assumptions of those engaged in this work. It examines work that has been carried out specifically on how perceptions of law and justice seem to be affected by popular culture. It notes some of the methodological issues that have emerged in these studies and goes on to look at what kinds of limitations are inherent in such kinds of work and how these might be addressed.

Housing Law in Scotland

Housing Law in Scotland seeks to explain the extent and nature of the changes in housing law over the last two centuries. It covers the right to buy, Rent Acts, Housing Acts, homelessness, poor‐quality housing and tenants rights. It also gives a comprehensive picture of housing rights in contemporary Scotland.

Law, Hollywood and the European experience

Just as the films that we see are conceived in specific economic, political and cultural contexts, so scholarship is produced within determined situations. This chapter notes some of the driving forces which have led to the emergence of law and film as an area of extensive and very diverse scholarship in the past decade. Whilst these factors have shaped the nature and extent of this work it should be noted that changes in both legal professional interests, academic criteria and within the culture industry mean that we can expect shifts in the nature and patterns of scholarship in the future. These may not, however, be the ones called for by other commentators (Moran, Sandon, Loizidou, & Christie, 2004; Sarat, Douglas, & Umphrey, 2005).

The representation of the professions in the cinema: the case of construction engineers and lawyers

This paper considers how popular culture, especially the cinema, depicts two professions; namely, engineering and the law. It argues that despite the large number of engineers working in the developed economies their lives and their work are seldom portrayed in cinema. In contrast, the legal profession is ubiquitous in its presence in film. The paper seeks to use different forms of analysis, such as culturalism, Marxism, structuralism, feminism and post‐modernism when applied to film theory in settings where engineers and lawyers are depicted. The paper makes a distinction between the presentation of the work of engineers and lawyers in ‘real life’ and cinematic form. The process of engineering in real life is visible yet in cinematic terms it is ignored. In contrast, the legal process is invisible in real life but has high dramatic content in the cinema. When considering the products of the two professions, engineering produces tangible products whilst law produces intangible yet highly cerebral discourses. Yet, in the cinema, the engineering product is a backcloth for other messages where in law the legal product provides a backcloth for a central and dominant message about the legal process. The conclusion is that engineers have to re‐engineer themselves to be more visible in society if they are to be regarded as cinematic heroes.

Book Review: Law and Poverty in Australia: 40 Years After the Poverty CommissionDurbachAndreaEdgeworthBrendanSentasVicki (eds), Law and Poverty in Australia: 40 Years After the Poverty Commission. Sydney, The Federation Press, 2017, pp. 320, ISBN 97817...

a ‘disappearance’ and who ‘counts’ as a disappeared person in any particular context), the challenges of navigating a path between amnesty as impunity and the requirement for some level of immunity in exchange for the provision of information, and the construction of images of the ‘ideal victim’ (p. 82) as a mobilization strategy. To enter one point of criticism – for me, the title of the book sells it a little short. It is on the one hand both tempting and right to foreground the families of the disappeared as without them, the fate of those disappeared would often remain unknown. And, as Kovras contends himself (p. 6), without the mobilization of the families, ‘a number of key transitional justice norms or mechanisms would not have been available’. But, in my view, the value of this book goes beyond its analysis of grassroots activism. One of its core strengths is as an investigation of the interaction between family mobilization efforts, the political context, and forensic developments, the importance of these elements coming together, and the challenges faced by those seeking the remains of their loved ones when they do not. To conclude, Kovras’s book is a timely, rich and engaging contribution to the academic literature on ‘disappearances’. It is a welcome addition to a body of work that is often single-context or single discipline, or purely qualitative. This book will appeal to sociolegal scholars, political scientists, Transitional Justice researchers and anyone interested in disappearances, mobilization or truth recovery.

The House of Lords and homeless people's rights

For the past 20 years, there has been legislation enshrining certain rights for homeless people. This essay is an assessment of the judiciarys role towards homeless people as far as it applies to the most senior court, the House of Lords. It describes the nature of those issues where the House of Lords have had the opportunity to discuss the operation of the homeless persons legislation. It also seeks to explore the reasons why the approach taken has been restrictive. The House of Lords has played an important part in interpreting the homeless rights legislation. The restrictive role of their Lordships is contrasted with other areas where the court has taken rather more generous perspectives on the rights of vulnerable people. It canvasses the various reasons why this should have occurred and notes that limited assistance can be gleaned from traditional approaches to this judicial task. It suggests that the concept of differential politicization throws useful light on the process.