By Michael Asimow & Jessica Silbey

Both law and popular culture pervade our lives.  Movies and television shape our perception of law and change how players in the legal system behave.  Now in its third edition, Law and Popular Culture: A Course Book explores the interface between these enormously important subjects.  Jessica Silbey joins Michael Asimow as a co-author of the book.

Each chapter examines a particular law-related subject, such as the adversary system, the life of lawyers, legal education, or family law. Each chapter is structured around a  legally-themed film or television show, such as Philadelphia, To Kill a Mockingbird, The Lincoln Lawyer, or LA Law, treating each of them as both a cultural text and a legal text.

The book is written in an engaging style without theoretical jargon and can serve as a basic text for undergraduate or graduate courses and seminars. It can be taught by anyone who enjoys pop culture and is interested in law.  An instructor’s manual is available on request.

MICHAEL ASIMOW is Dean’s Executive Professor of Law, Santa Clara Law School, and Professor of Law Emeritus, UCLA School of Law.  He teaches law and popular culture as well as contract law, taxation, and administrative law.  Asimow is the editor of Lawyers In Your Living Room: Law on Television (2009) and co-author with Paul Bergman of Real to Reel: Truth and Trickery in Courtroom Movies (2021) and has written numerous articles about law and pop culture.

JESSICA SILBEY is Professor of Law, Boston University School of Law. She teaches and writes in the areas of intellectual property and constitutional law. She was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2018 for her work at the intersection of law and the humanities.  She authored The Eureka Myth: Creators, Innovators and Everyday Intellectual Property (2015) and she has also published widely in the field of law and film, including two co-edited volumes Trial Films on Trial (2019) and Law and Justice on the Small Screen (2012).

Reviews:

Now on its third edition, Michael Asimow and Jessica Silbey’s Law and Popular Culture: A Coursebook is a classic that has taught generations of students how to critically analyze the complex connections binding popular legal reel-ity on screen and historical legal reality in courtrooms, and the interplay between both.  The book also serves as a masterful overview of both the various techniques film makers use to create engaging legal narratives as well as the different theories legal scholars use to analyze these narratives.  Clearly organized; engagingly written; pedagogically oriented with suggested questions and activities to enhance learning at both the undergraduate and graduate levels, this is a must-read for not only students and teachers of film and law, but also the general reader.  Caroline Joan S. Picart, author, Framing Law and Crime: An Interdisciplinary Anthology.

Law and Popular Culture combines film history, social history and legal issues in a readable and engaging way.  Better still, the course will help any would-be lawyer to see his or her role in society in a more humane and responsible way.  But best of all, this book and this course offers entertainment as well as enlightenment.  I never wanted to be a lawyer, but if this course had been around when I was in college, I would happily have embraced it.  —Richard Schickel, Film critic, Time Magazine, documentarian, and author of numerous books on film history and criticism.

October 2020, Paperback 458 pages, Ebook ISBN: 978-1-60042-528-8 - PDF