LAW4538: Lawyers, Literature & Cinema

2 x 1000 word Reflective Essays (20% each); 3000 word Research Essay (60%)

Pretty much my favourite ever law school unit, even though it's really more of an Arts unit... which probably says something about my degree choice, but anyway:

As the name suggests, this subject is all about representations of law and lawyers in film and literature. It’s kinda part film theory, part legal philosophy, and part sociology and other cultural studies etc. The overall name is I think ‘critical legal theory’, and apparently any decent US law school has such a course(s), although they are a bit less common in Australia. I can send the Unit Guide/Reading Guide/Course materials to anyone interested, but for a quick summary of the texts used anyway: Lord of the flies, Deliverance, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, High Noon, Yojimbo, Rashomon, Twelve Angry Men, The Thin Blue Line, The Verdict, Presumed Innocent, Cape Fear (original & remake), Sophie Scholl: The Final Days, M, The Trial, The Stranger, The Fall, In Cold Blood.

Many of these are both films and novels, which is one of the reasons for their selection (watching a movie obviously being easier than reading a book or two every week). All in all I think the choices are pretty good, the only real problem was that it was very difficult to fit them all into twelve weeks, and as a result Presumed Innocent and some of Cape Fear got skipped over in the lectures. The classes themselves were very interesting though, in terms of both style and substance. In terms of the former, I would highly recommend attending or listening to one Eric Wilson class (I think he also took Torts this sem - I wish I’d been in that class instead of having done it a few years back…he also used to take the now-defunct 1st year subject ‘RAW’, and regularly refers back to such times as his years in purgatory). He does go on a lot of tangents, everything from what really happened during the OJ Simpson trial, to the true meaning of Halloween, to the actual meaning of Rashomon - and that’s probably why we skipped over Presumed Innocent, but it was worth it. The lecturers in the law faculty are generally very good, although sometimes it’s just black letter law, presented without much in the way of opinion or conviction or humour, and this is a definite change from that…Wilson is definitely a character (apparently the law library has previously complained about his noisy lectures emanating from the law basement) .

He’s one of those lecturers that doesn’t have any slides and works off a word document, although in a class where there’s no exam that’s not going to be an issue anyway. Each topic has one of these documents with notes integrating excerpts from the books/films and other sources, such as critics/film theorists, philosophers, academics in various disciplines (Rene Girard’s theory of sacrifice is used a lot; Deleuze & Guattari also get a fair workout). By themselves they are a bit disjointed, although in the lectures things become clearer…it’d probably also have helped if I regularly did the readings. The documents are all available at Week One, so you know well in advance what the content is going to be.

They also contain the questions for each week for the two reflective essays. Each week (e.g. Week 3 was the two Westerns, Week 12 was In Cold Blood…) has the essay question at the end of the document. Some are quite brief & general (‘we hate lawyers but we love stories about them’) while others are about responding to some specific contention about texts or parts of them. You can pick any two questions from the twelve weeks; the first essay was due week five, the second in week nine. This obviously means that some topics will not have been covered in class when you write about them. I think people generally gravitated towards the ones that had been covered, although some people didn’t and did very well. It’s not really that much of an advantage doing the ones that have been covered, as obviously everyone else who does that topic also has the benefit of the lectures anyway. In general I don’t think the reflective essays are too much work, as they do not require any outside research and are meant to be written purely from your reflection on the readings, texts and lectures. Then again, they will require a fair bit of thinking, and I think it can be a bit hard to tell how you’re going when you’re not doing any external research c.f. most other uni assignments.

With the three thousand word essay (was due week 12, no exam - yay), on the other hand, it’s much more about research, and you pretty much have free reign as to topic. You can simply do an expanded or modified version of one of the reflective essay questions, or you can come up with your own thing, e.g. applying some theories from the course to a novel you happen to like, or comparing some films on the reading list with others that you know in terms of their ‘law and/as literature’ value. Topics have to be approved, but I think they generally are so long as they relate to the course in some way.
Anyway, overall I would highly recommend this unit. I think it’s good to use an elective or two on some of the broader law subjects that aren’t confined to black letter law, but look beyond it (and sometimes really criticise it), and LLaC does that very well.

Eric Wilson

N/A, no exam for the unit

5 out of 5

Yes

There's a reader full of extracts. Useful to buy to at least do the readings for your assignment topics, although you could save yourself the money by accessing the journals online & going to the library for the books, of course.

3hrs of lectures per week

S2 2015

TBA