How would you sum up the first 20 years of Law and Popular Culture as Essay

How would you sum up the first 20 years of Law and Popular Culture as a focus for scholarship in Law Schools and beyond - Essay Example Scholarship in â€Å"Law and Popular Culture’ uses this aspect of the discipline to educate attorneys in public awareness of the consequences of their actions. In critically evaluating the scholarship and impact of the last 20 years of â€Å"Law and Popular Culture† studies in Law Schools, the importance of image and appearance in constructing public opinion is made evident, as well as the popularity of legal themes in mainstream culture itself. Academic studies have drawn comparisons to the way media stereotypes of law and legal issues can frame public awareness of themes in ways that may be prejudicial to jury selection or point to biases that might influence juror opinions subliminally on technical legal issues of great importance. There has been an awareness of the importance of accuracy in legal representations in mass media, but also in the importance for lawyers to be aware of the social context when practicing law. In drawing legal issues through media stories in broad dualities, fictional programs such as film, video, television, and literary depictions represent the dynamic processes of law in the prosecutor and defence attorney. However, in painting the broader social context of these stories, and the personalities of the heroes and anti-heroes of law, thematic content can be noted to constellate around two primary archetypes as a fundamental division, 'the activist lawyer' and 'the corrupt lawyer'. As Richard Sherman writes in Symposium: Law and Popular Culture: Nomos and Cinema, â€Å"Law lives in images. We make sense of reality by drawing upon the stories and storytelling modes that are most familiar to us. And these days, television and film are by far the most popular sources of the stories and story forms that we all know. It should hardly prove surprising to find trial lawyers importing popular film stories and characters as well as familiar cinematic styles into their courtroom performances.†1 ‘Law and Popular Cul ture’ studies can draw upon groundbreaking work such as Joseph Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces and Masks Of God: Creative Mythologies to assist with the methodology of media interpretation through psychology. In understanding how the mind relates to ideas formed in popular culture through media, the assumption is that the unconscious and subconscious forces, emotions, and biases all act to build sentiment and identity in the individual as part of personal identity, as well as the more conscious and ego-driven goals. In pointing to the unconscious nature of crowd behaviour as it is reflected in public opinion in mass-media based societies in post-modernism, ‘Law and Popular Culture’ studies returns to its early roots and definitions, as posited by Lawrence Friedman in the 1980’s. For example, in Total Justice, written in 1985, Lawrence Friedman defines legal culture as "ideas, attitudes, values, and opinions about law held by a society.â₠¬ 2 However, he takes this definition further in Law, Lawyers, and Popular Culture, and essay published in the Yale law Journal in 1989. There he writes: "Legal culture refers to those ideas and attitudes which are specifically legal in content - ideas about courts, justice, the police, the Supreme Court, lawyers, and so on... the term popular culture, on the other hand, refers first, and more generally, to the norms