This book explores the interface between law and popular culture, two subjects of enormous current importance and influence. Exploring how they affect each other, each chapter discusses a legally themed film or television show, such as Philadelphia or Dead Man Walking, and treats it as both a cultural and a legal text, illustrating how popular culture both constructs our perceptions of law, and changes the way that players in the legal system behave. Written without theoretical jargon, Law and Popular Culture: A Course Book is intended for use in undergraduate or graduate courses and can be taught by anyone who enjoys pop culture and is interested in law.

What are the consequences when law's stories and images migrate from the courtroom to the court of public opinion and from movie, television and computer screens back to electronic monitors inside the courtroom itself? What happens when lawyers and public relations experts market notorious legal cases and controversial policy issues as if they were just another commodity? What is the appropriate relationship between law and digital culture in virtual worlds on the Internet? In addressing these cutting edge issues, the essays in this volume shed new light on the current status and future fate of law, truth and justice in our time.

Commentators have noted the extraordinary impact of popular culture on legal practice, courtroom proceedings, police departments, and government as a whole, and it is no exaggeration to say that most people derive their basic understanding of law from cultural products. Movies, television programs, fiction, children’s literature, online games, and the mass media typically influence attitudes and impressions regarding law and legal institutions more than law and legal institutions themselves. Law and Popular Culture: International Perspectives enhances the appreciation of the interaction between popular culture and law by underscoring this interaction’s multinational and international features. Two dozen authors from nine countries invite readers to consider the role of law-related popular culture in a broad range of nations, socio-political contexts, and educational environments. Even more importantly, selected contributors explore the global transmission and reception of law-related cultural products and, in particular, the influence of assorted works and media across national borders and cultural boundaries. The circulation and consumption of law-related popular culture are increasing as channels of mass media become more complex and as globalization runs its uncertain course. Law and Popular Culture: International Perspectives adds to the critical understanding of the worldwide interaction of popular culture and law and encourages reflection on the wider implications of this mutual influence across both time and geography.

Readings in Law and Popular Culture is the first book to bring together high quality research, with an emphasis on context, from key researchers working at the cutting-edge of both law and cultural disciplines. Fascinating and varied, the volume crosses many boundaries, dealing with areas as diverse as football-based computer games, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, digital sampling in the music industry, the films of Sidney Lumet, football hooliganism, and Enid Blyton. These topics are linked together through the key thread of the role of, or the absence of, law - therefore providing a snapshot of significant work in the burgeoning field of law and popular culture. Including important theoretical and truly innovative, relevant material, this contemporary text will enliven and inform a legal audience, and will also appeal to a much broader readership of people interested in this highly topical area.

Applying innovative interpretive strategies drawn from cultural studies, this book considers the perennial question of law and politics: what role do the founding fathers play in legitimizing contemporary judicial review? Susan Burgess uses narrative analysis, popular culture, parody, and queer theory to better understand and to reconstitute the traditional relationship between fatherhood and judicial review. Unlike traditional, top-down public law analyses that focus on elite decision making by courts, legislatures, or executives, this volume explores the representation of law and legitimacy in various sites of popular culture. To this end, soap operas, romance novels, tabloid newspapers, reality television, and coming out narratives provide alternative ways to understand the relationship between paternal power and law from the bottom up. In this manner, constitutional discourse can begin to be transformed from a dreary parsing of scholarly and juristic argot into a vibrant discussion with points of access and understanding for all.

This volume shows how university and college professors can create an engaging environment that encourages students to take a deep approach to learning through the use of popular culture stories in law school and in criminal justice classrooms. The use of popular culture (films, TV shows, books, songs, etc.) can enhance the deep learning process by helping students develop cognitive skills, competencies, and practices that are essential for the professional practice of law and criminal justice and which are often neglected in traditional law school and criminal justice curricula. The book covers such topics as: critical thinking skills in legal and criminal justice education the role of popular culture in educating for rapid cognition factors that foster intrinsic motivation using storytelling in law and criminal justice teaching with popular culture stories popular culture and media literacy in the classroom lawyers and criminal justice agents and their dealings with the press influence of popular culture stories in the legal and criminal justice fields regulations for the use of media texts in the legal and criminal justice fields how stereotyping is influenced by popular media how to prepare a promising syllabus or course outline This unique book is the result of the author’s many years of teaching as well as of many meaningful discussions in seminars and teaching and learning workshops that he facilitated. This very easy-to-read and entertaining volume will show readers how to enhance their classes by creating a motivating and engaging environment that will foster students’ deep learning experiences.

In a world of globalised media, Japanese popular culture has become a signifi cant fountainhead for images, narrative, artefacts, and identity. From Pikachu, to instantly identifi able manga memes, to the darkness of adult anime, and the hyper- consumerism of product tie- ins, Japan has bequeathed to a globalised world a rich variety of ways to imagine, communicate, and interrogate tradition and change, the self, and the technological future. Within these foci, questions of law have often not been far from the surface: the crime and justice of Astro Boy; the property and contract of Pokémon; the ecological justice of Nausicaä; Shinto’s focus on order and balance; and the anxieties of origins in J- horror. This volume brings together a range of global scholars to refl ect on and critically engage with the place of law and justice in Japan’s popular cultural legacy. It explores not only the global impact of this legacy, but what the images, games, narratives, and artefacts that comprise it reveal about law, humanity, justice, and authority in the twenty-first century.