Atticus Finch, Where Are You? @thanerosenbaum @ABAJournal

Are films featuring lawyer-heroes out? Thane Rosenbaum thinks so. In a new essay for the ABA Journal, he says in part,

When it comes to movie heroes, the quintessential moral archetype has been Atticus Finch from To Kill a Mockingbird. But he is not alone. Cinema has offered a virtual parade of eloquent charmers, jury-seducers of the first order. To name a few examples, there’s Paul Biegler (Anatomy of a Murder), Frank Galvin (The Verdict), Henry Drummond (Inherit the Wind), Sir Wilfrid Robarts (Witness for the Prosecution), Sandy Stern (Presumed Innocent) and Kathryn Murphy (The Accused)—among scores of other smooth courtroom specialists—all with a God complex and a clear conscience.
But judging from the films that have been released in this new millennium, the tropes that once dominated legal dramas have given way to an entirely new twist on the genre. Cinema has developed a newfound cynicism about the once-righteous trial attorney. Nowadays, perhaps consistent with our diminished faith in public institutions, the legal system and its practitioners, as depicted in movies, have been found wanting and guilty.

Read the entire essay here.

Human Rights Lawyers in Films

Corallina Lopez-Curzi created this short list of human rights lawyers on film for Rights Info. While it includes Joe Miller from Philadelphia and Betty Ann Waters from Conviction, it also lists Erin Brockovich from the film of the same name, who isn't a lawyer (Ms. Lopez-Curzi concedes that). There are other human rights lawyers we could include, especially if we define "human rights lawyer" as she seems to, as lawyers who defend clients with rights claims, and not as lawyers who repeatedly take on human rights cases. Indeed, just about any lawyer could fill the bill.  How about Atticus Finch, the epitome of the human rights lawyer (To Kill a Mockingbird)? Jed Ward (iClass Action)? Sir Wilfred Robards (Witness for the Prosecution)? Paul Biegler (Anatomy of a Murder)? Martin Vail (Primal Fear)?  Kathryn Murphy (The Accused)? And of course Hans Rolfe and Richard Widmark in Judgment at Nuremberg?

Alfred Hitchcock on Bad Guys @ABAJournal

In the current issue of the ABA Journal:

Who's the Bad Guy: What Alfred Hitchcock Can Teach Lawyers About Villains and Villainy, by Philip Meyer

CFP: John Grisham and the Law: The University of Memphis Law Review @uofmemphis

From the Mailbox: Via Andrew J. McClurg, University of Memphis School of Law:

CALL FOR PAPERS:  JOHN GRISHAM AND THE LAW

Rudy Baylor, a Memphis Law graduate, lost his new associate job before it even started when a bigger firm bought the firm that had hired him as a 3L.  Defeated, yet still determined to pursue a career in the law, Baylor accepted an associate job at an ambulance-chaser firm.  Little did young Baylor know that he would soon find himself litigating against a white-shoe law firm representing a health insurance monolith in an insurance claim—his very first case—that wound up being worth $50 million.

Of course, none of this actually happened in real life.  Twenty years ago, this tale unfolded on the silver screen in the 1997 major motion picture The Rainmaker, which brought to life author John Grisham’s novel of the same name.

We hope you will join us in celebrating John Grisham’s contributions to the law by submitting your articles on legal topics that arise in Grisham’s stories to The University of Memphis Law Review.  An ideal submission will frame its content with specific reference(s) to Grisham’s work(s) and will offer a practical legal argument.  We aim to publish accepted manuscripts in Volume 48, Number 3 of The University of Memphis Law Review.

John Grisham has repeatedly found ways to use his novels to offer incisive commentary on our profession and has popularized timeless themes of law and justice for the masses, in the South and elsewhere.  Topics could include, but are not limited to:

The Runaway Jury

·         Voir dire / jury tampering

·         Settlements and arbitration

·         Collateral estoppel

The Chamber

·         Death penalty and politics

·         Working with hostile clients

·         Ethical considerations when representing members of the same family

A Time to Kill

·         Race and the law

·         Law in the South

·         Vigilante justice

·         Hate crimes

·         Advocacy techniques

·         Right to a fair trial (venue, voir dire)

·         Capital punishment

The Client

·         Fifth Amendment issues

·         Witness-protection program

·         Attorney-client privilege

The Firm

·         Mail fraud

·         Moral obligations when you know your client is guilty

·         Moral and professional conflicts arising for junior associates

·         Balancing the obligation to maintain clients’ confidentiality with the obligation to comply with law enforcement’s demands

The Rainmaker

·         Attorney-client relationships

·         Self-defense justifications

·         Refusal to pay insurance claims

·         Punitive damages

·         Tort reform

Submission Protocol

To submit an entry to this themed book, please submit directly to Maggie McGowan, Senior Articles Editor at memphislawarticles@gmail.com with “Grisham Book” in the subject line.

A "Top Ten List" of Fictional Lawyers From @OllyJarviso

Olly Jarvis offers a list of his ten favorite fictional lawyers here. Do any on the list surprise you? I have to say that the choice of Edward G. Robinson's Victor Scott (Illegal) and Matthew Shardlake (C.D. Ransom's character from a sequence of popular novels) were choices I didn't expect.

Mr. Jarvis is the author of  two legal thrillers, Cut-Throat Defense (2016) and Death By Dangerous (2015). He practices criminal law in Manchester, England.

Lawyers, Power, and Identity in "Philadelphia"

Richard M. Cornes, University of Essex School of Law, has published Philadelphia – Self, Power and Hollywood's Safe Money Agenda. Here is the abstract.

Philadelphia, a film about a man fired because of fear of AIDS (and behind that, fear of homosexuality) was released in 1993. It was one of the first Hollywood movies to address HIV and homophobia. Hollywood congratulated itself on its bravery, awarding Tom Hanks and Bruce Springsteen Oscars (for best lead actor and best movie song respectively).

Twenty-two years later, homophobia is alive and well. In England, in the first week of January 2015, two straight BBC male radio presenters went for a walk on the streets of Luton hand in hand, recording the adverse reactions they encountered on film (available online. I mention this to guard against the rosy nostalgia which might otherwise arise from the passage of time between 1993 and today. Certainly we now have marriage equality in a number of countries, including England, Wales and Scotland, and 36 US states, but two men holding hands on a British street still attracts sniggers, stares, and insults. The impulse to discriminate on the basis of perceived sexual orientation that Andrew Becket – the film’s lead – challenges in 1993 is still very much with us.

This essay considers the film from the perspective of a module on management and organization studies, drawing on Bell’s (2008) work on understanding management and organizations through film. I am not the first to study Philadelphia from this perspective: see Holliday, 1998; and from the perspective of a legal scholar, Asimov, 2001. I bring three strands of analysis. The first is concerned with motivation and the self – what does it mean to be a “lawyer”? The second is concerned with issues of power relating to sexuality, in the legal work place, and Hollywood. The third looks directly at Hollywood and its treatment of inter alios, gay men.

Download the paper from SSRN at the link.