Publisher Description

Presents an in-depth survey of how lawyers are portrayed in television dramas and comedies. Spanning five decades, 18 contributions refer to about 350 shows (both the famous and the obscure) as well as to more general topics such as science fiction, situation comedies, soap operas, westerns, and lawyers who are female and/or young. The volume features a foreword by the legal advisor to the shows L.A. Law and Paper Chase. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

In 1985, handyman Wayne Dumond was accused of raping the daughter of a prominent Arkansas businessman. Not long after Dumond was released on bail, two masked gunmen broke into his home, bound and castrated him, and left him to die. His school-aged sons returned home in time to save Dumond's life, but he was later convicted and imprisoned for life. Jack Hill, a Jonesboro, Arkansas television newsman who had been looking into the shenanigans of the sheriff of St. Francis County, began investigating the Dumond case. He found an appalling trail of evil and corruption so widespread that even then-Governor Bill Clinton was forced to address it. Hill discovered that Dumond's severed testicles were taken by the sheriff, who displayed them like a trophy. After DNA tests proved Dumond was not the rapist, Hill pressed Clinton for clemency. The governor refused, even after his own parole board recommended that Dumond be released. It turned out that Clinton was a cousin of the rape victim and a political ally of the prosecutor who put Dumond away. When Clinton ran for president, he turned the case over to the lieutenant governor, who reduced Dumond's sentence.

Set in Appalachian coal country, this “superb” (Pittsburgh Post-Gazette) legal drama follows one determined lawyer as he faces a coal industry giant in a seven-year battle over clean drinking water for a West Virginia community. For two decades, the water in the taps and wells of Mingo County didn’t look, smell, or taste right. Could the water be the root of the health problems—from kidney stones to cancer—in this Appalachian community? Environmental lawyer Kevin Thompson certainly thought so. For seven years, Thompson waged an epic legal battle against Massey Energy, West Virginia’s most powerful coal company, helmed by CEO Don Blankenship. While Massey’s lawyers worked out of a gray glass office tower in Charleston known as “the Death Star,” Thompson set up shop in a ramshackle hotel in the fading coal town of Williamson. Working with fellow lawyers and a crew of young activists, Thompson would eventually uncover the ruthless shortcuts that put the community’s drinking water at risk. Retired coal miners, women whose families had lived in the area’s coal camps for generations, a respected preacher and his brother, all put their trust in Thompson when they had nowhere else to turn. Desperate is a masterful work of investigative reporting about greed and denial, “both a case study in exploitation of the little guy and a playbook for confronting it” (Kirkus Reviews). Maher crafts a revealing portrait of a town besieged by hardship and heartbreak, and an inspiring account of one tenacious environmental lawyer’s mission to expose the truth and demand justice.

This volume widens the scope of Legal Linguistics from the traditional focus on performative texts like statutes to the popularization of legal knowledge for different purposes. The chapters, written in English, German or French, discuss the theoretical basis and methods and investigate popularization efforts by national institutions, law firms and community websites. The objects of study cover a variety of modes and media from different national contexts reaching from print folders over online written texts to YouTube videos and movies.

Here is the explosive story of the Kids for Cash scandal in Pennsylvania, a judicial justice miscarriage that sent more than 2,500 children and teens to a for-profit detention center while two judges lined their pockets with cash, as told by Candy J. Cooper, an award-winning journalist and Pulitzer Prize finalist. In the early 2000s, Judge Mark Ciavarella and Judge Michael Conahan of Luzerne County, Pennsylvania were known as no-nonsense judges. Juveniles who showed up in their courtrooms faced harsh words and even harsher sentencing. In the post-Columbine era, many people believed that was just what the county needed to ensure its children and teens stayed on the straight and narrow path. But as more and more children faced shocking sentences for seemingly benign crimes, and a newly built for-profit detention center filled up further and further, a sinister pattern of abuses and bribery emerged. Through extensive research and original reporting leading into contemporary times, award-winning journalist Candy J. Cooper tells the story of a scandal that the Juvenile Law Center calls “one of the largest and most serious violations of children’s rights in the history of the American legal system.”

This cutting-edge edited collection brings together 17 scholarly essays on two of cinema and television’s most enduring and powerful themes: law and crime. With contributions by many of the most prominent scholars in law, sociology, criminology, and film, Framing Law and Crime offers a critical survey of a variety of genres and media, integrating descriptions of technique with critical analysis, and incorporating historical and socio-political critique. The first set of essays brings together accounts of the history of the Law and Cinema Movement; the groundbreaking genre of “post-apocalyptic fiction;” and the policy-setting genesis of a Canadian documentary. The second section of the book turns to the examination of a range of international or global films, with an eye to assessing the strengths, frailties, and possible functions of law, as depicted in fictional cinema. After an international focus in the second section, the third section focuses on law and crime in American film and television, inclusive of both fictional and documentary modes of narration. This section’s expansion beyond film narratives to include television series attempts to broaden the scope of the edited collection, in terms of media discussed; it is also a nod to how the big screen, although still a dominant force in American popular culture, now has to compete, to some extent, with the small screen, for influence over the collective American popular cultural imaginary. The fourth section, titled brings together various chapters that attempt to instantiate how a “Gothic Criminology” could be useful, as an interpretative framework in analyzing depictions of law and crime in film and television. The fifth and final section covers issues of pedagogy, epistemology, and ethics in relation to moving images of law and crime. Merging wide-ranging analyses with nuanced scholarly interpretations, Framing Law and Crime examines key concepts and showcases original research reflecting the latest interdisciplinary trends in the scholarship of the moving image. It addresses, not only scholars, but also fans, and will heighten the appreciation of connoisseurs and newcomers to these topics alike.