Patterns of Courtroom Justice
| Date | 01 March 2001 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/1467-6478.00181 |
| Published date | 01 March 2001 |
| Author | Jessica Silbey |
JOURNAL OF LAW AND SOCIETY
VOLUME 28, NUMBER 1, MARCH 2001
ISSN: 0263-323X, pp. 97–116
Patterns of Courtroom Justice
Jessica Silbey*
Any one film can sustain a myriad of compelling intepretations. A
collection of films, however, sharing formal and substantive qualities,
reveals a common effect more than a diversity of meanings. This essay
traces the shared formal and substantive qualities of a group of films, as
I name them ‘trial films’. It documents this genre of film by identifying
the genre’s norms of viewing and identification. It also investigates
peculiar hybrid discourse of the trial film genre that combines both
filmic and legal discursive practices to show how trial films cultivate
support for the American system of law through its constitution of a
specific viewing audience. In so doing, I broach the followi ng questions:
how do images of law in film help sustain the power and legitimacy of
legal institutions? How does the study of film genres, like the courtroom
drama, reveal the way law lives beyond its formal processes?
I. THE GENRE AND ITS VIEWER-SUBJECT
What will follow in this essay will be the identification of the ‘trial film’
genre. Specifically, I look at the space of the courthouse and courtroom and
how, in film, they signify legal processes and law’s promise of justice. In
practice, the trial is a ritualistic aspect of the law that is often overlooked
(and, in fact, a stage in the litigation process that is rarely reached) but that is
crucial to the law’s binding of its practice with its ideals in culture. I would
dare to say that the trial, for many people, is the symbol of law in action.
How, then, does it garner meaning in these films?
My answer is two-fold. First, trial films, as a group, contain identifiable
patterns of narrative structure, cinematic features, and character development
that manifest assumptions, embolden expectations, and reproduce
ideological notions of legality. These patterns – marks of a genre – induce
specific expectations of law in the films’ community of viewers,
97
ßBlackwell Publishers Ltd 2001, 108 Cowley Road, Oxford OX4 1JF, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA
*Law Clerk to Hon. Levin Campbell, US Court of Appeals for First Circuit;
(from August 2001) Associate in Litigation, Foley, Hoag and Eliot LLP,
Boston, Massachusetts, United States of America.
expectations of their own subjective and authoritative role in making
meaning and meting out justice within the American legal system. Second,
in order for these patterns to be influential (as I argue that trial films are in
the production of popular legal consciousness), as embodied by the trial film
genre, these patterns constitute and encourage the identification of a specific
kind of film viewer, what I call the trial film’s viewer-subject. This viewer-
subject is one end-effect of the trial film genre: an experience through which
the spectator (inscribed by the filmic text) interacts with the social viewer
(audience member) and is asked to assume certain positions within and by
the film in order to make sense of it. This viewer-subject is one way trial
films help sustain the power and legitimacy of legal institutions.
The trial film’s viewer-subject mirrors the concept of the liberal legal
subject (the subject of legal liberalism) and his central role in the pursuit of
justice.
1
In a three-stage process, the trial film encourages its viewer-subject
both to believe in his crucial contribution to the law’s success and to critique
the law’s all-encompassing constitutive capabilities. Normally (that is,
generically), this critical position is incorporated into the film’s story of law
and results in an affirmation of both law’s capacity to include those who dissent
from it and film’s capacity to incorporate its viewers in its worldmaking. The
trial film deliberately choreographs the viewer-subject’s participation in and
critique of law to produce and sustain the ideology of liberal legalism: an
understanding that law’s recursive structure sustains its authority and power,
but also an insistence on the possibility of (as the liberal legal subject claims to
embody an example of) individual resistance and agency despite law’s
engulfing presence. In other words, the viewer-subject of trial films, as
constituted by the discursive strategies of film and law, is encouraged to expect
justice through law by virtue of his unique contribution to the system (the
filmic system of meaning and the legal system of justice), and yet also to insist
that justice reside apart from the law’s institutionalized processes.
II. THE VIEWER-SUBJECT’S JOURNEY TOWARD JUSTICE
1. Step one: framing patterns, static symbols, and establishing shots
Most initially striking among trial films are the consistent establishing shots
setting the scene in the house of law. Much of the time, these shots are at the
beginning and end of the film, like a frame, the law as the skeleton that
structures the story.
2
Other times, these shots are only in the film as the trial
98
1 I deliberately use the masculine pronoun here. One of my arguments, made
elsewhere, is that the dominant viewer-subject of the trial film is male, that is, the
liberal legal subject as constituted by trial films is gendered masculine. J. Silbey, ‘The
Subjects of Trial Films’ (PhD., University of Michigan, 1999) ch. 5.
2 See, for example, the discussion of And Justice for All (Norman Jewison, 1979) that
follows.
ßBlackwell Publishers Ltd 2001
To continue reading
Request your trial