William Haltom

Movies On Trial: The Legal System On The Silver Screen, By Anthony Chase

Anthony Chase, long-time observer of legal culture and often-published commentator on law films, has constructed a set of essays in pursuit of “an alternative view of legality, one every bit as likely to undermine ruling ideas about fairness and formal legal equality as to reinforce them” (p. xiii). Professor Chase calls the hub at the intersections of his chapters “cinematic jurisprudence.” From his cinematic jurisprudence the exposition extends radially along themes familiar from law curricula and legal specializations (p. xii). Along such radii he traces interrelations between fairness and justice and equality and other values and the images flickering on screens in theaters and living rooms. The book begins from musings about legal visibility: what formal proceedings encourage participants to see and what such proceedings tend to obscure. As crucial for artistry as for politicking, this issue centers Chase’s studies. This focus is felicitous, for it pushes the reader beyond the vulgar legal realism of documenting discrepancies between law and lawyering on screens and law and lawyering on the streets and in the courts. Although Chase occasionally lapses into phrasings that suggest that movies are true to relationships between or among core values, usually he adheres to articulation of alternatives to some settled notions that films make evident. Then, in “Popular Culture, Legal Genre, Realism,” Chase concludes his monograph with a kaleidoscope of perspectives on filmic legal realism (comparing movies to legal work and jural settings to assay the degree to which movies seem to critics—usually lawyers or legal academics—authentic), dualistic trial movies (the trial in a courtroom is often paired with trials outside court, as in The Verdict or The Rainmaker), and vying theories of popular or mass culture. The author easily but not facilely skewers critiques based on presumed orthopraxy, orthodoxy, or other fidelity to legal theory or practices. The culmination of the volume, in short, is to show that movies about trials are as multidimensional as other artistry or media. Intermediate chapters enable readers to see more about, respectively, the rule of law and other foundational matters (Chapter 2), crime control versus due process visions in criminal law (Chapter 3), the “master discourse” of tort cinema (Chapter 4), international law (Chapter 5); and comparative law in Germany (Chapter 6). The alternative visions tend to vary with characteristics of the themes. Constituting a polity that is at least somewhat formal-legal is a vast enterprise that has largely defied cinematic explications or dramatizations, so Chapter 2 necessarily deploys synecdoche. Scholars have applied Herbert Packer’s two understandings of criminal justice to movies and other media, so on that theme Chase displays his own variations. The author formulates tort cinema as a genre on the basis of four films—The Verdict, Class Action, Philadelphia, and The Rainmaker—and then sees how

Popular Justice: Presidential Prestige and Executive Success in the Supreme Court, by Jeff Yates. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2002. 131 pp.

This monograph will likely please students of the United States Supreme Court or the U.S. presidency more than it will profit students of political communication. Institutional specialists will probably welcome Professor Yates’s identification of gaps in statistical investigations of interplays between presidents and justices and will certainly admire his virtuosity at filling those gaps. By contrast, communication specialists may be uncomfortable with shortcomings characteristic of this genre of analysis: deracination from context, reductionism worked by some measures and concepts, and stinting attention to or curiosity about politicking and communicating. Nevertheless, those who study political communication may acquire baseline expectations and recognize deviations therefrom, which might yield hypotheses to be subjected to more contextual, rich, and penetrating analyses of how justices and presidents correspond. Professor Yates deftly reviews extant studies and articulates propositions derived or derivable from those studies. He selects appropriate methods and provides succinct but satisfactory accounts of his analyses. He examines interactions between or among presidents, justices, bureaucrats, and public opinion in a very efficient, effective manner, although the interaction effects are explicitly considered less often than they might have been. Tabular and graphic displays are revealing. Annotations are useful and transparent. The listed references seemed to this reviewer copious. Most students of judicial behavior and not a few students of presidential behavior should find this volume interesting and enlightening. Dr. Yates verifies that resolutions of Supreme Court cases that involve or impinge upon presidents or the executive branch tend to be associated with measurable attitudes of justices and other political factors external to adjudication per se. “Liberal” justices tend to vote against presidents in contests over presidential powers. Justices tend to defer to executive agencies or bureaus that agree with justices ideologically or politically. When executive authority is at stake, justices do not always vote exclusively in line with their own policy preferences but may be influenced by mass opinion, elite arguments, or both. Communications scholars may find some wording cavalier, as when Professor Yates deploys seemingly casual terms such as “determine” or “determinant” or “effect” for what must be complex, contingent, recursive, and discursive relations and when he treats an expectation as tantamount to a theory. This reader cannot be certain exactly what Professor Yates means when he asserts that justices “reference” presidential approval in litigation involving presidential powers, for example, because that noun-treated-as-verb could mean so many things that it is largely a placeholder for a thicker description of processes communicative or political or both. The analyses in this book might also be complemented with more sensitive reflection on the dialectical interactions of variables the independence or endogeny of which is subject to far more negotiation and nuance than is usually acknowledged explicitly.

17.95 paper.

In analyzing editorial reactions to church-state decisions of the U.S. Supreme Court, some support is found for the hypothesis that approval of judicial decisions correlates with partisan attitudes. However, it is found that partisan cleavages on Court decisions have blurred due to habituation to precedent, compromised holdings, and judicial justification. This evidence leads the authors to conclude that attentive lay publics of the Court, such as editorialists, may be less partisan, or partisan less often, than many observers have supposed.