Readings in Law and Popular Culture

Steven Greenfield, Guy Osborn, Steven Greenfield, Guy Osborn

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2007
• Print ISBN: 9780415376471
• eBook ISBN: 9781134223541
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Law
• Subtopic: Law Theory & Practice
• Index: Law

Readings in Law and Popular Culture is the first book to bring together high quality research, with an emphasis on context, from key researchers working at the cutting-edge of both law and cultural disciplines.

Fascinating and varied, the volume crosses many boundaries, dealing with areas as diverse as football-based computer games, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, digital sampling in the music industry, the films of Sidney Lumet, football hooliganism, and Enid Blyton. These topics are linked together through the key thread of the role of, or the absence of, law - therefore providing a snapshot of significant work in the burgeoning field of law and popular culture.

Including important theoretical and truly innovative, relevant material, this contemporary text will enliven and inform a legal audience, and will also appeal to a much broader readership of people interested in this highly topical area.

1
Law, legal education and popular culture*

Steve Greenfield and Guy Osborn

Given the likely value of popular culture to the law school and given the fact that the existence of academic freedom in both research and teaching is one of the defining features of a university law school, how law schools meet the challenges set by the study of law and popular culture is indicative of the intellectual and professional state of health of those law schools.¹

In terms of the undergraduate programme, the law school curriculum is in many ways a narrow one. This is partly due to the professional requirements of legal study, and the concomitant requirement of the core subjects demanded in order for a degree to be a qualifying one, and partly because of a broader adherence to the black-letter tradition.² This is not meant to be a dogmatic statement. It is of course apparent that there are some attempts to go beyond a black-letter approach to legal study, both outside and within the core elements of study.³ The professional requirements dictate the prescriptive nature to a degree, but legal education has changed – in fact, the skills agenda which came to prominence in the 1980s⁴ was driven by the professions and their desire for a more skills-based curriculum. On a related issue it is important to make clear that a subject is not necessarily outside of the black-letter tradition just because it is a novel or different area, it is a question of approach.⁵

In terms of academic research this black-letter hegemony has manifested itself historically with a conservative approach both to ‘acceptable’ subject matter and the ways in which the subjects were treated.⁶ Of course, not all law schools are the same and a number of approaches persist. Often conflicting approaches may reside in the same school, and while the black-letter tradition is not all pervasive it still exerts a powerful influence.⁷ In addition to this, legal academics may themselves have difficulties when attempting to locate the law within wider social structures and contexts, as Macaulay puts it; ‘…many law professors experience vertigo when they open the doors and look outside appellate courtrooms’.⁸ Taking a wider vista, Sugarman notes the position of the law in relation to other academic disciplines, and in particular law’s isolation from these disciplines and its reluctance to embrace change.⁹ That said, the law curriculum has evolved, partly as a response to external pressure¹⁰ partly because of dynamism on the part of the law itself and shifts within approaches within individual law schools:

University law schools are not, of course, fixed entities, wholly unable to escape their past. A number of writers have argued that the research paradigm in university law schools is changing and that theoretical work or socio-legal studies rather than doctrinal law now represents the dominant mode.¹¹

The point is further made by Cownie and Bradney that teaching developments tend to lag behind research ones, so the impact of the research paradigm upon the student experience may well be minimized, at least initially. The developments that have occurred illustrate that whilst internally there may have been a reticence to embrace change for all sorts of reasons, not least perhaps this endemic inertia of substance and delivery, governmental bodies such as that overseen by Ormrod in the form of the Report of the Committee of Legal Education.¹² have pointed out that academic legal education should be seen within a broader social and economic context. That there have been attempts to embrace this has been vividly illustrated by the growth in a series of welfarist-focused courses within the UK. Those fairly recent law subjects that have attempted to stress their relevance and position to society. These could include Labour Law, Family Law, Social Security Law and perhaps today, Human Rights and the Law. Again the point needs to be made that these subjects could just as easily be taught within a black-letter framework, it is a question of approach and context.

In addition to this, developments such as that of the Critical Legal Studies Movement further attempted to map the ‘politics of law’ by offering different readings of legal texts, and to encourage the use of other interpretative techniques to analyse the law; witness for example the various approaches in Kairys’ collection.¹³ On a similar basis, the Socio-Legal Studies Association in the UK posited a view of law that embraced other disciplines and approaches and was concerned with ‘… the study of legal phenomena which is multi- or inter-disciplinary in its approach. Our theorectical perspectives and methodologies are informed by research undertaken in many other disciplines’.¹⁴ This undoubtedly had some influence, and these approaches will have impacted upon syllabi and research of adherents to this socio-legal philosophy. That said, the black-letter tradition has persisted. As Redhead notes:

Whether the depth of this challenge of a new legal conceptualism was actually maintained in the 1980s and even into the 1990s, either in the United States or elsewhere, is a moot point … suffice it to say that by the end of the 1980s a positivist-dominated law curriculum was still the norm in most British law schools.¹⁵

However, in terms of popular culture, a further problem can be identified. Not only was there a hurdle of establishing a ‘law and…’ element within the context of a predominantly black-letter tradition within the law school, but also the difficulty of confronting debates in some quarters (both inside and outside the legal academy) as to the relevance of popular culture.

This rejection, or marginalization, of popular culture, is charted by Turner in his exemplary history of British Cultural Studies.¹⁶ As Newman notes, echoing Redhead’s point about 1980s dominant traditions:

[p]opular culture theorists have claimed that their field has been ignored by elitist scholars, who view popular culture as not worthy of serious study, because it is popular … This attitude toward popular culture has prevailed since Matthew Arnold’s Culture and Anarchy (1869). Popular culture began to receive scholarly attention in the 1960s and 1970s, but the 1980s saw a resurgence of the ‘back to basics’ movement in education exemplified by the Harvard Core Curriculum’.¹⁷

So, ‘law and popular culture’ is afflicted by a double jeopardy – a narrow approach to the law curriculum, and a cautious attitude to popular culture. Yet here lies the conundrum – the area attracts interest by virtue of the fact that it is popular and relevant, yet there may be a reluctance to accept it because of its popular status. However, this accessibility and contemporaneity has nurtured developments throughout the 1990s in terms of research initiatives within the field of law and popular culture. This has been in terms of research centres focusing upon the law/popular culture interface more generally (such as the Centre for the Study of Law, Society and Popular Culture at the University of Westminster and the Unit for Law and Popular Culture at Manchester Metropolitan University) as well as more specific areas e.g. sport and law (such as the Sports Law Centre at Anglia Polytechnic University).

So law and popular culture faces two initial problems. The first an internal legal one where the academic hegemony determines that law is a text in need of interpretation, rather than a system of social relations.¹⁸ Second, a persistent (elitist) perception in some quarters of popular culture as ‘cheap’, ‘trashy’ and lacking in value. However, running counter to these two positions is a strong movement which suggests that in fact much may be learned about the law, and legal processes from an interrogation and understanding of this very relationship.¹⁹ Indeed, this book hopefully adds further weight to that argument, or at least goes further to support the acceptance of the fact that a contextual inquiry of the law, and an understanding of how the law interacts with the everyday, has a useful and valid purpose.

Law’s engagement with popular culture

Before looking at the ways in which the law has engaged with, and often colonized, popular culture, it is useful to briefly illustrate how popular culture has engaged with the law. At this juncture it is also helpful to consider what is meant by popular culture itself. It is in fact very difficult to frame a definition as all cultures, groups and historical periods can have their own notions of popular culture²⁰ and part of the joy of...

Table of contents

• Routledge studies in law, society and popular culture
• Contents
• Contributors
• 1 Law, legal education and popular culture*
• Part I Theory and academia
• Part II Sport
• Part III Film, literature and music
• Index