Foreword: Law in Living Color

ASIAN LAW JOURNAL VOL. 5 1998 No. 1 Foreword: Law In Living Color Margaret M. Russellt When asked by the editors of the Asian Law Journalto serve as guest editors for a special symposium issue on race, law, and film, Professor Margaret Chon and I welcomed the opportunity for a number of reasons. First, the Asian Law Journal occupies a singular position among law reviews in its explicit commitment to foster scholarship focusing on the history, experiences, and concerns of Asians in the United States and intemational legal systems; it is an honor to be associated with such a critically important enterprise. Second, the specific topic of this symposium issue is unique as well; although the broader subject of law and film has been explored in recent years through the innovative work of Professor John Denvir and others,' this symposium is the first volume of essays focusing particularly on the analysis of films as a means to understand the role of race in American law. Given the burgeoning interest in interdisciplinary critiques of popular culture in contemporary explorations of race, it seems both timely and illuminating to focus the lens of scholarly analysis on the way in which popular movies depict racial themes in the law. Finally, as we consulted with the ALJ editors about the possible themes of and contributors to this project, Margaret Chon and I realized with great excitement that this collaboration presents the fortuitous opportunity for us to work with talented scholars in such fields as critical race theory, queer theory, and feminist theory-and, we hope, to bring their thought-provoking and original work to a new and broader audience of legal practitioners and laypersons, as well as legal scholars and law students. What, then, is the purpose of a symposium on the theme of race, law, © 1998 Asian Law Journal, Inc. t Associate Professor of Law, Santa Clara University. A special thanks to Maggie Chon for her many collaborative strengths, the Asian Law Journal staff for their excellent and dedicated work; and to my family for their supportive company. 1. See, e.g., JOHN DENviR, LEGAL REELISM: MOVIES AS LEGAL TEXTS (1996); Paula C. Johnson, The Social Constructionof Identity in Criminal Cases: Cinema Verite and the Pedagogy of Vincent Chin, 1 MICH. J. RACE & L. 347 (1996); Charles Musser, Film Truth, Documentary, and the Law: Justice at the Margins, 30 U.S.F. L. REV. 963 (1996); Richard K. Sherwin, Law Frames: Historical Truth and Narrative Necessity in a Criminal Case, 47 STAN. L. REV. 39 (1994). For interesting perspectives on the reconstruction and distortion of history in popular films, see PAST IMPERFECT: HISTORY ACCORDING TO THE MOVIES (Mark Carnes ed., 1995). ASIAN LAWJOURNAL [Vol. 5:1 and film? One way to begin this inquiry is to consider the medium of film-particularly popular, mainstream, commercial film-as a vital and powerful form of communication. If people in the United States have a common "language," it is a language of media-driven construction. For better or worse-or, perhaps more accurately, for better and worse-we live in a society and an era in which the ubiquity of commercial television and movies has led to a presumed universality of interests, tastes, and values. Despite differences across lines of age, class, race, ethnicity and gender, the common "language" we speak is the medium itself-in all of its exhilarating and vexing visuality, viscerality, and distortion. Do you want to have a finger on the pulse of what "America" is wanting, buying, thinking? Spend some time watching popular movies and television. Are you interested in exploring national fantasies and fears, attitudes and prejudices, mores and morals? Spend some time watching popular movies and television. These influential cultural markers reveal much-not only about the mindsets of their audiences of consumers, but also about the motivations that spawn their production. In this regard, the usefulness of film in exploring popular cultural attitudes about law and the legal system depends upon the examination of films as texts, tools, and objects of critique. In Legal Reelism: Movies as Legal Texts, Denvir frames the question in this way: How can films be legal texts? Of course films are dissimilar from the normal legal trilogy of constitutions, codes and cases in that they are not primarily produced with an eye to the resolution of legal disputes; but there are also similarities between films and the traditional legal canon. For instance, like other more traditional legal sources, they are cultural artifacts open to warring interpretations both on the descriptive and normative level. Just as a street map of Los Angeles, a David Hockney painting, and a Beach Boys song all are "texts" that can teach us something, different things about Southern California, law reports and The Godfather... both tell us something, different things, about "the rule of law." Just as no one would claim that the street map told the whole story, neither should we think that worthwhile insights on law are all contained 2 in law libraries. Starting, then, with the premise that films can serve as valuable sources of insights into law and the legal system, one can identify two broad approaches to popular films reflecting law-related preoccupations. The first is an examination of the prototypical "law film"-namely, a movie in which heroic courtroom battles and out-of-court plot developments all revolve around the resolution of A Major Case by a Heroic Lawyer. Examples of this genre abound, from Adam's Rib, To Kill A Mockingbird,and Inherit the Wind to Amistad and the endless stream of John Grisham thrillers such as The Firm, The Pelican Brief, The Client, The 2. DENvi, supra note 1, at vii. 1998] FOREWORD: LAWINLIVING COLOR Chamber, A Time to Kill, and The Rainmaker. Films of this genre typically exhibit an almost perversely unrealistic glamorization of the legal profession and legal process as captivating, sexy, grandiloquent, and morally compelling. Even films that satirize lawyers as amoral (Liar, Liar) or downright evil (The Devil's Advocate) package their critiques by suggesting that law and lawyers are far more scintillating and powerful than they actually are. These "lawyer films" use the legal profession as a stage for a grand morality play. It is usually easy to pinpoint the valorous and the villainous; whatever the path chosen by the particular protagonist involved, the lawyer emerges as the center of the viewer's attention. A second and subtler approach to the viewing of law-related films focuses not on superstar lawyers or cases, but on less obvious issues of identity, power, and ideology in a broader sociolegal framework. Often, such films are affecting because of what they reveal about the personal stories underlying legal struggles. A film such as Dead Man Walking, for example, is a compelling legal "text" about the death penalty not because of legal jargon or trial scenes, but because (...truncated)