1 From but a handful of tentative essays, see Baker, The Lawyer in Popular Fiction, 3 J. Popular Culture 493 (1969); Chase, Toward a Legal Theory of Popular Culture, Wis. L. Rev. (forthcoming); Dienstfrey, Doctors, Lawyers and Other TV Heroes, in H. Newcomb, ed., Television: The Critical View 74 (1976); Nevins, Law, Lawyers and Justice in Popular Fiction and Film, Humanities Educ, May 1984, at 3; H. Newcomb, Doctors and Lawyers: Counselors and Confessors, in id., TV: The Most Popular Art 110 (1974).Google Scholar

2 J. Fiske & J. Hartley, Reading Television (1978); Winston, Prime Time's Copycat Creativity, In These Times, Nov. 6–12, 1985, at 16, 16.Google Scholar

3 For treatment of a wider range of popular culture formats that also provides an overview of the development of the theory of popular cuture in America, see Chase, supra note 1.Google Scholar

4 Neale, S., Genre 48 (1980).Google Scholar

5 After completing this essay, I had the good fortune to read Boyle, Anatomy of a Torts Class, 34 Am. U.L. Rev. 1003 (1985). Although the subject of Boyle's essay (strategies of argumentation and legitimation within appellate judicial reasoning) is radically different from mine here, there remains, nevertheless, the intriguing parallel use by both of us of a set of three antinomic pairs that structure discourse and that help reveal, in different contexts, how meaning is produced. See id. at 1051–63.Google Scholar

6 Warren, C., 1 History of the Harvard Law School 13 (1908).Google Scholar

7 H. B. Zobel, The Boston Massacre 220 (1970).Google Scholar

8 See, e.g., Alfred Hitchcock's film The Wrong Man (1957). Donald Spoto, describing Henry Fonda's character in this picture, says that through “Manny's eyes, we stare at the small coffin-like cot in his cell as the nightmare world closes in. Even when he is released on bail next morning, we sense the psychic toll and fear for his life. This leads to the second narrative movement. After an attorney is hired, we move from the physical enclosure of the prison to a mental enclosure: the wife's paranoia, which results in her total emotional collapse.” D. Spoto, The Art of Alfred Hitchcock 285 (1976). Of course we suspect that Fonda is “the wrong man” from the beginning of Hitchcock's film, yet film directors and novelists working in the mystery or suspense genres often precipitate twists and turns in audience belief as part of their technique of engaging the viewer or reader in the story. A good example is Billy Wilder's film, Witness for the Prosecution (1958), much enlarged from the Agatha Christie story, in which there is even a warning to the audience included at the end of the film requesting that they not give away the secret of the film.Google Scholar

9 Knock On Any Door was perhaps the first Hollywood film to deal directly with the post-World War 11 rise of “juvenile delinquency” in the United States—the first film that is made about juvenile delinquents rather than for juvenile delinquents. The latter variety would survive into the 1960s at studios like American International; see, e.g., Roger Corman's The Wild Angels (1966), which Leonard Maltin describes as “OK after about 24 beers.” L. Maltin, TV Movies, 1985–86, at 990 (1984). See also Frank Tashlin's fascinating film, Artists and Models (1955) (starring Jerry Lewis, Dean Martin, Shirley MacLaine, Dorothy Malone, and George “Foghorn” Winslow), in which we have an example of popular culture itself reflecting on the “popular culture debate”—in this instance, the furor over the alleged harmful effects of comic books on 1950s youth.Google Scholar

10 I have similarly ambivalent feelings about the scene in Ford's Sergeant Rutledge (1960) where Woody Strode, on trial for his life, explains why (as a black man, representing his race to the entire white world) he had to return to his military outfit even though he knew he would be brought back to face a military court. His powerful courtroom speech has the larger than life quality of a New Deal post office mural. For our purposes here, what counts is that many of John Ford's classics (especially including Sergeant Rutledge) are monumentally revealing artifacts of American legal and patriotic culture. See J. McBride & M. Wilmington, John Ford (1975).Google Scholar

11 Roddick, N., A New Deal in Entertainment: Warner Brothers in the 1930s, at 166 (1983). See infra note 38.Google Scholar

12 Baker, supra note 1, at 502.Google Scholar

13 Id. at 502–9.Google Scholar

14 Nevins, supra note 1, at 4.Google Scholar

15 For an interesting discussion of Finch's character, see T. L. Shaffer, American Legal Ethics 3–57 (1985). On the status of Traver's Anatomy and Harper Lee's Mockingbird (1962) as “blockbuster” popular novels, see K. Davis, Two-Bit Culture: The Paperbacking of America (1984). Davis reports that by 1966, Anatomy had sold 3_1/2 million copies in paperback and Mockingbird 5 _1/2 million, which placed the latter on a par with Roget's Pocket Thesaurus (1946) and which exceeded the number of paperback copies sold of Dale Carnegie's How to Win Friends and Influence People (1940), Mickey Spillane's I, the Jury (1948), Nabokov's Lolita (1959), even JFK's Profiles in Courage (1947); Davis, supra at 289–90.Google Scholar

16 The idealized notion of an independent lawyer, answerable to nothing save his own conscience, had of course been prevalent within Anglo-American legal culture two centuries prior to the rise of mass media of communications and twentieth-century popular culture; see, e.g., L. P. Stryker, For the Defense, Thomas Erskine: The Most Enlightened Liberal of His Times, 1750–1823 (1947); H. Zobel, supra note 7; Schudson, Public, Private, and Professional Lives: The Correspondence of David Dudley Field and Samuel Bowles, 21 Am. J. Legal Hist. 191 (1977).Google Scholar

17 The image of the virtuous lawyer can simultaneously embrace criminal defense attorneys, personal injury lawyers, even a “special prosecutor” like Archibald Cox, because the thread that runs throughout this series of lawyer heroes is their willingness to play David to the system's Goliath—and come out on top; e.g., Paul Biegler (against the slick “Dancer” from East Lansing), Atticus Finch (against “the solid South”), Frank Galvin (against the Catholic Church, the medical profession, and a firm of very high-priced defense lawyers), even Cox (against Nixon, the Republican party, and the government).Google Scholar

18 For general analysis of the period between the Russian launching of the first space satellite (Oct. 4, 1957) and the assassination of President Kennedy (Nov. 22, 1963)—including the way in which popular culture both reflected and helped shape American life—see, e.g., D. J. Boorstin, The Americans: The Democratic Experience (1973); J. Makower, BOOM! Talkin' About Our Generation (1985); W. A. McDougall, the Heavens and the Earth: A Political History of the Space Age (1985).Google Scholar

19 See Kinoy, A., Rights on Trial (1983); D. Caute, The Great Fear: The Anti-Communist Purge under Truman and Eisenhower (1978); S. Kutler, The American Inquisition: Justice and Injustice in the Cold War (1982).Google Scholar

20 See, e.g., J. Malcolm, Psychoanalysis: The Impossible Profession 6 (1981): “The phenomenon of transference—how we all invent each other according to early blueprints—was Freud's most original and radical discovery [T]he most precious and inviolate of entities—personal relations—is actually a messy jungle of misapprehensions, at best an uneasy truce between powerful solitary fantasy systems. Even (or especially) romantic love is fundamentally solitary, and has at its core a profound impersonality. The concept of transference at once destroys faith in personal relations and explains why they are tragic: we cannot know each other.” See also A. S. Watson, Psychiatry for Lawyers 38 (1978): “Both lawyers and psychiatrists face the same public attitude, which is that neither of them is concerned with ethical values. Often the lawyer is judged to be a hypocrite and the psychiatrist an anarchist.”Google Scholar

21 See Speiser, S., Lawsuit (1980).Google Scholar

22 See H. McClosky & J. Zaller, The American Ethos: Public Attitudes Toward Capitalism and Democracy (1984); N. Chomsky, Turning the Tide 240–45 (1985); Thomas, Growing Pains at 40, Time, May 19, 1986, at 22, 35.Google Scholar

23 See Moskowitz, M., M. Katz, & R. Levering, eds., Everybody's Business: An Almanac 78–80 (1980).Google Scholar

24 Lincoln, as both John Ford and Gore Vidal have shown, is a critical figure in American self-conceptions. During the Watergate crisis, New York Times columnist (and Harvard Law adjunct) Anthony Lewis disparaged Nixon's counsel by contrasting him with Honest Abe, who would give up on a client before his closing argument (and let the jury know) if he became convinced his client was guilty. Often overlooked (whatever quality of advocate Lincoln was in practice) is that the future president (who put Stephen Field on the U.S. Supreme Court) was an attorney for the Illinois Central Railroad (i.e., a “corporation lawyer” among other things).Google Scholar

25 See Chase, , The Strange Romance of “Dirty Harry” Callahan and Ann Mary Deacon, Radical Am., vol. 7, no. 1, 1973, at 20.Google Scholar

26 See J. A. Lukas, Nightmare: The Underside of the Nixon Years (1976); S. M. Hersh, The Price of Power: Kissinger in the Nixon White House (1983); T. Plate & A. Darvi, Secret Police (1981).Google Scholar

27 For a start in this direction, see A. Appel, Jr., Signs of Life (1983); T. Balio, ed., The American Film Industry (1976); S. P. Benson, S. Brier, & R. Rosenzweig, eds., Presenting the Past (1986); P. Biskind, Seeing Is Believing: How Hollywood Taught Us to Stop Worrying and Love the Fifties (1983) (includes an extremely interesting discussion of the politics of Lumet's 12 Angry Men); J. Gilbert, A Cycle of Outrage: America's Reaction to the Juvenile Delinquent in the 1950s (1986); B. Nichols, Ideology and the Image (1981); W.I. Susman, Culture as History: The Transformation of American Society in the Twentieth Century (1984).Google Scholar

28 However much Coogan 's Bluff may be regarded as “middle of the road” in terms of the politics of criminal justice, it is much more “conservative” (throughout) in terms ofsexual politics; see J. Mellen, Big Bad Wolves: Masculinity in the American Film (1977).Google Scholar

29 See Dershowitz, A., The Best Defense 321–83 (1982) (fascinating, blow-by-blow account of the undoing of “the Prince,” which presents him—and police misconduct—in a somewhat different light than they are shown in Lumet's film, though both Dershowitz and Lumet seem to have a certain animosity toward prosecutors).Google Scholar

30 Lawrence, Introduction, in E. Dahlberg, Bottom Dogs, From Flushing to Calvary, Those Who Perish, and Hitherto Unpublished and Uncollected Works 147, 147 (1976).Google Scholar

31 The Young and the Restless (1973-) is described by Alex McNeil as (among all soap operas) “TV's most artistic serial” and as set in the “medium-sized town of Genoa City,” which is located somewhere in mid-America. A. McNeil, Total Television 728 (2d ed. 1984) (excellent, single-volume, paperback television reference work).Google Scholar

32 “Based on John's gross income and his lack of debt, the judge rules that 2,000 a week for Jill's temporary support is a reasonable request. Jill feels she's won a major battle, but Jack is very concerned that when his father and Jill go to court over the final settlement, John won't hesitate to call Kay Chancellor to testify.” The Young and the Restless, Soap Opera Dig., Jan. 28, 1986, at 90, 91. Over dinner with his client, Michael assures Jill that there is no way they can lose their case. As he prepares to leave, Jill tries to coax him to stay, but Michael doesn't believe in mixing business with pleasure…. Later, having had some time to go over John's financial statements, Michael meets with Jill. He expains that she will be entitled to 50% of the increase in all of John's assests since they have been married. Since it appears that John is much wealthier than Michael thought, Jill's settlement could well turn out to total somewhere between two and five million dollars! [exclamation point in original] The Young and the Restless, Soap Opera Dig. Feb. 11, 1986, at 86, 86. See also The Young and the Restless, Soap Opera Dig., May 6, 1986, at 96, 96: “Pleased about the results of her meeting with John, Jill asks Michael if he's heard any official word from John's lawyer regarding the terms of the settlement. Though his response is negative, she assures him that he will hear soon.” Soap operas are, perhaps, one of only a few American social institutions that progress as slowly as the legal process.Google Scholar

33 See Kaplan, , The Struggle for Control over the Female Discourse and Female Sexuality in Welles's Lady from Shanghai (1946), in E. A. Kaplan, Women and Film: Both Sides of the Camera 60 (1983).Google Scholar

34 Part of what Bannister has to say: Money cannot bring you health and happiness, etc., is that it? Without money I'd be flat on my back in the ward of a county hospital. Look at this yacht: it once belonged to Jules Bachrach—the Great Bachrach—who kept me out of his club because my mother was a Manchester Greek. I got him on perjury. He died bankrupt, and here I am. Each man has his own idea of happiness, of course, but money is what all of us have in common. Take Bessie here. She used to work for Bachrach. I pay her more, don't I, Bessie? Bessie responds, “Yes, Mr. Bannister.” Her salary means happiness. So Bessie goes to church every Sunday she gets off and prays to God she'll never be too old to earn the salary I pay her. The “visual story” told by Welles's camera during this grotesque monologue continues (and deepens) the critique of greed: Bessie's humiliation, Michael's repulsion mixed with a certain fear of Bannister, and the utter indifference of Bannister's law partner and Bannister's wife, both of whom are thoroughly preoccupied trying to get a cigarette lit, finally conscripting Michael into even this particular service.Google Scholar

35 It is extremely suggestive to relate this image of the lawyer as shark to some of the currents running through fear of wolves, cannibals, and of (generally) “being eaten”; see E. Jones, On the Nightmare 152 (1951): “In this connection it is interesting to note that the ideas associated with that of wolves reveal how profoundly the people apprehend the essence of antisocial behaviour to be sadistic in nature. For instance, the Norse word vergr meant both wolf and a godless man. It is cognate with the Anglo-Saxon wearg, a scoundrel, Gothic vargs, a fiend.” See also Chase, Fear Eats the Soul, 94 Yale L.J. 1253 (1985).Google Scholar

36 See Learning, B., Orson Welles: A Biography (1985).Google Scholar

37 R. Sennett & J. Cobb, The Hidden Injuries of Class 226–27 (1973).Google Scholar

38 The negative image of lawyer as shark can also be used, it seems to me, to stigmatize American Jews without risking an obvious association with anti-Semitism. In an extremely valuable issue of New German Critique (devoted entirely to a discussion of “Heimat” or “homeland”), Gertrud Koch surveys the renascence of anti-Semitism in Europe today: “The equation of a competitive market economy, of the plague of commercialization, with 'the Jews' has been a staple of antisemitic critiques of civilization already in pre-fascist Germany Today, the syllogistic line of attack is directed largely against 'the Americans' to whom 'the Jews' in turn are joined by association. In a polemic against the TV series, Holocaust, [Edgar] Reitz goes so far as to assert: 'The most fundamental process of expropriation is that which robs human beings of their own history. With Holocaust, the Americans have taken history away from us.'” Koch, How Much Naivete Can We Afford? The New Heimat Feeling, Frauenund Film, May 1985, at 38, quoted in Hansen, Dossier on Heimat, 36 New German Critique, Fall 1985, at 3, 15–16. Just as Koch invites us to substitute “Jews” for “Americans” (in Reitz's comment) to understand what is in fact being communicated, I think we can substitute “Jews” for “lawyers” in much anti-lawyer stereotyping within American popular culture—a not altogether surprising situation in a country long dominated by Protestant culture and Protestant elites. Jerold Auerbach has splendidly revealed the extent to which anti-Semitism has characterized the history of the American Bar Association and professional elites within the law, yet it remained outside the purview of his book Unequal Justice (1976) to examine the ways in which anti-Semitism has characterized hostility to attorneys within American society at large. For a possible foundation to the kind of critique I am proposing, see L. Friedman, Hollywood's Image of the Jew (1982).Google Scholar

39 See Montgomery, , America's Working Man, Monthly Rev., Nov. 1985, at 1.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

40 See Godnick, , Book Note, 30 N.Y.L. Sch. L. Rev. 467 (1985) (noting M. Green, It's Legal To Laugh: A Collection of Humor About the Legal Profession (1984)).Google Scholar

41 It is also worth pointing out in passing that the “outlaw” genre can develop a certain political acuity when it is not utterly absorbed with telling the story of flawed individuals doomed from the start; see, e.g., the musical recording of the ballad “Pretty Boy Floyd,” by the Byrds in their late-sixties/early-seventies C & W mode on the album Sweetheart of the Rodeo:” As through this life you travel, you meet some funny men/Some will rob you with a six-gun and some with a fountain pen/As through this life you ramble, as through this life you roam/You will never see an outlaw take a family from their home.”Google Scholar

42 Wood, M., America in the Movies 138 (1975).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

43 For example, consider the timidity of American attorneys in defending the legal order of constitutional rights during periods of national inquisition; see Auerbach, supra note 38, at 102–57, 231–62.Google Scholar

44 See Eisner, L., Fritz Lang 174–75, trans. G. Mander (1977): “Lang had been witness to the way the Hitler movement grew gradually from nonsense which no-one took seriously into the terror which did not stop short of murder in the gas chambers. It is not fanciful to find a parallel between the gradual and menacing growth of hatred in a crowd lusting for a lynching, and the Hitler terror.” See also C. Lanz-mann, Shoah 95–100 (1985) (section of printed dialog corresponding to sequence in Lanzmann's extraordinary film about the Holocaust where a group of Christian villagers in contemporary Chelmno gradually reveal their emotional attitude toward Jews; to borrow a phrase from the bourgeois observer at Charenton in Weiss's Marat/Sade: “See how quickly a crowd turns mob.” F. Neumann et al., The Cultural Migration: The European Scholar in America (1953) (on contributions to American life and letters by refugees from Nazi Europe).Google Scholar

45 See work regularly appearing in such journals as Harvard Women's Law Journal and Minnesota's Law and Inequality: A Journal of Theory and Practice; Taub & Schneider, Perspectives on Women's Subordination and the Role of Law, in D. Kairys, ed., The Politics of Law 117 (1982); Polan, Toward a Theory of Law and Patriarchy, in id., at 294; MacKinnon, Feminism, Marxism, Method and the State: An Agenda for Theory, 7 Signs 515 (1982); id., Feminism, Marxism, Method and the State: Toward Feminist Jurisprudence, 8 Signs 635 (1983).Google Scholar

46 See E. A. Kaplan, ed., Women in Film Noir (1980); E. Abel, ed., Writing and Sexual Difference (1982); M. Rosen, Popcorn Venus (1973); B. French, On the Verge of Revolt: Women in American Films of the Fifties (1978); J. Mellen, supra note 28; K. K. Ruthven, Feminist Literary Studies (1984); M. Doane, P. Mellencamp, & L. Williams, eds., Re-Vision: Essays in Feminist Film Criticism (1984); E. A. Kaplan, Women and Film, supra note 33; T. Moi, Sexual/Textual Politics: Feminist Literary Theory (1985); G. Greene & C. Kahn, eds., Making a Difference: Feminist Literary Criticism (1985); L. Robinson, Sex, Class, and Culture (1986).Google Scholar

47 See both MacKinnon articles, supra note 45.Google Scholar

48 MacKinnon (1983), supra note 45, at 644–45.Google Scholar

49 See, e.g., S. Harding, The Science Question in Feminism (1986); Irigaray, Is the Subject of Science Sexed? Cultural Critique, Fall 1985, at 73; Longino & Doell, Body, Bias, and Behavior: A Comparative Analysis of Reasoning in Two Areas of Biological Science, 9 Signs 206 (1983); Keller, Feminism and Science, 7 Signs 589 (1982); Rose, Hand, Brain, and Heart: A Feminist Epistemology for the Natural Sciences, 9 Signs 73 (1983).Google Scholar

50 Spoto, supra note 8, at 385. See also R. Durgnat, The Strange Case of Alfred Hitchcock, or The Plain Man's Hitchcock 333–49 (1974).Google Scholar

51 See Spoto, , supra note 8, at 385: “The Brenners and Melanie become virtual prisoners in the house, and when Melanie is viciously attacked in the attic, her state of shock and the severity of her wounds make it imperative that the group attempt to leave. During a lull in the attacks, they are 'allowed' to leave by the gathering mass of birds, and the final frames show them driving slowly away before, we presume, the next savage onslaught.”Google Scholar

52 Eagleton, “Capitalism, Modernism and Post-Modernism,” 152 New Left Rev. 60, 71–72 (1985); see also Chase, supra note 1.Google Scholar

53 See Chase, , American Legal Education Since 1885: The Case of the Missing Modern, 30 N.Y.L. Sch. L. Rev. 519, 523–28 (1985) (discussing “structures of feeling” and “mentalities” in relation to the periodization of legal change).Google Scholar