Friday, August 06, 2010
A friend alerted me to the American Bar Association's list of the 25 Greatest Fictional Lawyers. They did a similar list of great movies about the law two years ago. The Great Legal Movies list is different from my own Great Lawyer Movies list-- the ABA's ontological scheme includes Twelve Angry Men, for example, which is not a Lawyer Movie at all.
This year's list impresses me as rather shaky. It crosses media for one thing-- lawyers from novels, movies, plays and television all mingle. It is too heavy on the criminal law side as well, something that I tried to avoid in my scheme. Finally, the works the ABA cites are mostly potboilers-- fun to read or to watch, but not really very good depictions of our glamor profession. Were I teaching a course in Fictional Lawyers I'd lead off with William Faulkner's Gavin Stevens-- The Town, maybe, or perhaps Knight's Gambit. I'd also be sure to include Shakespeare's Portia, a lawyer's lawyer who knows that the science of jurisprudence must be tempered with discretion in order to achieve justice.
This year's list impresses me as rather shaky. It crosses media for one thing-- lawyers from novels, movies, plays and television all mingle. It is too heavy on the criminal law side as well, something that I tried to avoid in my scheme. Finally, the works the ABA cites are mostly potboilers-- fun to read or to watch, but not really very good depictions of our glamor profession. Were I teaching a course in Fictional Lawyers I'd lead off with William Faulkner's Gavin Stevens-- The Town, maybe, or perhaps Knight's Gambit. I'd also be sure to include Shakespeare's Portia, a lawyer's lawyer who knows that the science of jurisprudence must be tempered with discretion in order to achieve justice.
// posted by Bill @ 8:02 AM 
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