The Cultural Lives of Cause Lawyers

by Edited by Austin Sarat , Stuart Scheingold

• ISBN13: 9780521711357
• ISBN10: 0521711355
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2008-03-10
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Summary

This book seeks to illuminate what we call the cultural lives of cause lawyers by examining their representation in various popular media (including film, fiction, mass-marketed non-fiction, television, and journalism), the work they do as creators of cultural products, and the way those representations and products are received and consumed by various audiences. By attending to media representations and the culture work done by cause lawyers, we can see what material is available for citizens and others to use in fashioning understandings of those lawyers. This book also provides a vehicle for determining whether, how, and to what extent cause lawyering is embedded in the discourses and symbolic practice around which ordinary citizens organize their understanding of social, political, and legal life. This book brings together research on the legal profession with work that takes up the analysis of popular culture. Contributors to this work include scholars of popular culture who turn their attention to cause lawyers and experts on cause lawyering who in turn focus their attention on popular culture. This is a joining of perspectives that is both long overdue and fruitful for both kinds of scholarship.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	p. ix
Contributors	p. xi
Bringing Cultural Analysis to the Study of Cause Lawyers: An Introduction	p. 1
The Cultural Work of Cause Lawyers
"No sacrifice is too great for the Cause!": Cause(less) Lawyering and the Legal Trials and Tribulations of Gone	p. 27
Purpose-Driven Lawyers: Evangelical Cause Lawyering and the Culture War	p. 56
Cause Lawyers and Cracker Culture at the Constructive Edge: A "Band of Brothers" Defeats Big Tobacco	p. 79
The Cultural Construction of Lawyers and Their Causes
"They all have different policies, so of course they have to give different news": Images of Human Rights Lawyers in the British Press	p. 141
Ed Fagan and the Ethics of Causes: Who Stole Identity Politics?	p. 172
Of Windmills and Wetlands: The Press and the Romance of Property Rights	p. 188
"The Kids are Alright": Cause Lawyering on Television in 1960s America	p. 203
Nothing to Believe In - Lawyers in Contemporary Films About Public Interest Litigation	p. 230
"Of course he just stood there; he's the law": Two Depictions of Cause Lawyers in Post-Authoritarian Chile	p. 253
Paulina Escobar as Cause Lawyer: "Litigating" Human Rights in the Shadows of Death and the Maiden	p. 278
The Cultural Reception of Lawyers and Their Causes
Cause Lawyering "English Style": Reading Rumpole of the Bailey	p. 297
Now You See It, Now You Don't: Cause Lawyering, Popular Culture, and A Civil Action	p. 331
Not What They Expected: Legal Services Lawyers in the Eyes of Legal Services Clients	p. 359
Index	p. 389
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