LAW & CULTURE WORKSHOP
presents
Susan Bandes
DePaul University College of Law
We Lost it at the Movies:
The Rule of Law Goes from Washington to Hollywood and Back Again
Wednesday, March 12, 2007
12:30 - 2:00
Flavelle Dining Room - 78 Queen's Park
This essay, written as part of a symposium on popular culture and the civil justice system, examines the vast gap between legal and popular discourse on the judicial role. The legal academy generally regards as uncontroversial the proposition that judicial interpretation cannot be value-free. Yet in popular discourse, the ideal judge is someone who leaves all prior attitudes behind, simply applying the law that is out there and that admits to only one possible outcome. Judges perceived to deviate from this ideal are at risk of being branded activist. Members of the lay public - a majority of them, according to a recent survey - are upset about what they perceive to be activist judges. Perhaps more disheartening, pledging fealty to this unrealistic view of the judicial role remains de rigueur in the halls of Congress. This essay explores the connection between the depiction of the judicial role in popular media such as movies and television and the very similar caricature that still holds sway in more serious non-fiction venues, like Senate confirmation hearings and political campaigns. In popular venues, the judge is generally depicted either as a neutral or invisible placeholder for a fixed and determinate rule of law, or as biased, vulgar, or downright villainous. Drawing from legal theory, narrative theory, psychology, and prior work on popular culture and media studies, I argue that the simplistic notion of judges and judging that currently dominates the discourse is inherently conservative and hegemonic, and suggest that this state of affairs poses dangers for the rule of law and the evolution of the judicial system.
Susan Bandes is Distinguished Research Professor at DePaul University College of Law, and is a visiting professor at the University of Chicago Law School for the 2007-08 academic year. She joined the DePaul faculty in 1984, and teaches criminal procedure, federal courts, and a seminar on law and literature. Her legal career began in 1976 at the Illinois Office of the State Appellate Defender. In 1980, she became staff counsel for the Illinois A.C.L.U., where she litigated a broad spectrum of civil rights cases, and also co-drafted and helped secure passage of the Illinois Freedom of Information Act. Her scholarship focuses on government accountability, with a more recent focus on the role of emotion in law. Her articles appear in, among others, the Yale, Stanford, University of Chicago, Michigan and Southern California law reviews, as well as peer-reviewed journals including Law and Social Inquiry, Constitutional Commentary, and the Journal of Law, Culture and the Humanities. Her book The Passions of Law was published by NYU Press in January 2000, and released in paperback in 2001. Her recent pro bono activities include acting as co-reporter for the Constitution Project's bipartisan Death Penalty Initiative, which produced the report "Mandatory Justice: Eighteen Reforms to the Death Penalty," and, currently, serving on the advisory board to the Chicago Council of Lawyers' working group studying the criminal justice system in Cook County, IL.
A light lunch will be served.
For workshop information, please contact Nadia Gulezko at n.gulezko@utoronto.ca
