You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
This book examines the American television legal series from its development as a genre in the 1940s to the present day. Villez demonstrates how the genre has been a rich source of legal information and understanding for Americans. These series have both informed and put myths in place about the legal system in the US. Villez also contrasts the US to France, which has seen a similar interest in legal series during this period. However, French television representations of justice are strikingly different, as is the role of fiction in offering viewers the possibility of acquiring significant understandings of their legal system. The book will be an important addition to the study of popular culture and law and will interest legal scholars, sociologists, and media scholars.
American legal television series have long informed viewers - and fostered myths - about the legal system in the US. Villez examines this genre from the 1940s to the present, and contrasts American legal shows with those in France, where the same genre offers a strikingly different representation of justice.
From Perry Mason and The Defenders in the 1960s to L.A. Law in the 80s, The Practice and Ally McBeal in the 90s, to Boston Legal, Shark and Law & Order today, the television industry has generated an endless stream of dramatic series involving law and lawyers. This new guide examines television series from the past and present, domestic and foreign, that are devoted to the law.
For most of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, classical dogma and royal censorship worked together to prevent French plays from commenting on, or even worse, reenacting current political and judicial affairs. Criminal trials, meanwhile, were designed to be as untheatrical as possible, excluding from the courtroom live debates, trained orators, and spectators. According to Yann Robert, circumstances changed between 1750 and 1800 as parallel evolutions in theater and justice brought them closer together, causing lasting transformations in both. Robert contends that the gradual merging of theatrical and legal modes in eighteenth-century France has been largely overlooked because it chal...
Popularizing National Pasts is the first truly cross-national and comparative study of popular national histories, their representations, the meanings given to them and their political and societal uses, expanding outside the confines of Western Europe and the US. It draws a picture of popular histories which is European in the full sense of this term, making available to English readers the cutting edge of Eastern European scholarship on popular histories, nationalism, and culture.
In this wide-ranging study, Erica Sheen explores the various ways in which Shakespeare, or the idea of Shakespeare, was entangled in literary, cultural, political and diplomatic, legal, and economic attempts to articulate the tensions and opportunities of the early Cold War period.
This edited collection provides the first accessible introduction to Law and Humanities. Each chapter explores the nature, development and possible further trajectory of a disciplinary ‘law and’ field. Each chapter is written by an expert in the respective field and addresses how the two disciplines of law and the other respective field operate. This edited work, therefore, fulfils a real and pressing need to provide an accessible, introductory but critical guide to law and humanities as a whole by exploring how each disciplinary ‘law and’ field has developed, contributes to further scrutinizing the content and role of law, and how it can contribute and be enriched by being understood within the law and humanities tradition as a whole.
The public understanding of law is gleaned from the cultural representation of justice which, in turn, reflects popular culture. Movies, caricatures, portrayal of trials by media or crime fiction shape the image of justice. However these representations play an important role in the legal system itself through the representation of truth as conveyed by litigating parties in their arguments. Studying how justice is represented in society is thus interesting for citizens who want to understand the popular culture but also for lawyers who want to understand theirs clients' expectations. This book explores in a multidisciplinary way the aspects of those representations of justice in their various forms in popular culture and in economics.
The Sopranos is recognized as the most successful cable series in the history of television. The Washington Post has called the popular series, winner of twenty-one Emmys and five Golden Globes, “the television landmark that leaves other landmarks in the dust.” In every aspect—narrative structure, visual artistry, writing, intertextuality, ensemble acting, controversial themes, dark humor, and unflinching examinations of American life—The Sopranos has had few equals. Offering a definitive final assessment of the series, The Essential Sopranos Reader aims to comprehensively examine the show’s themes and enduring cultural significance. Gender and ethnicity, the role of dreams, the rebirth of HBO, the series’ controversial finale, and other topics come under scrutiny in this highly accessible, engaging collection. The book concludes with an interview with Dominic Chianese, who played Uncle Junior in all six seasons of the show.
This book opens up a range of important perspectives on law and violence by considering the ways in which their relationship is formulated in literature, television and film. Employing critical legal theory to address the relationship between crime fiction, law and justice, it considers a range of topics, including: the relationship between crime fiction, legal reasoning and critique; questions surrounding the relationship between law and justice; gender issues; the legal, political and social impacts of fictional representations of crime and justice; post-colonial perspectives on crime fiction; as well as the impact of law itself on the crime fiction’s development. Introducing a new sub-field of legal and literary research, this book will be of enormous interest to scholars in critical, cultural and socio-legal studies, as well as to others in criminology, as well as in literature.