Law and Popular Culture (LAW-814-001B)
Bridgewater
Meets: 01:00 PM - 02:50 PM (W) - Room 501
Enrolled: 4 / Limit: 2
Notices
Class Partnership with The Modern American. The Modern American, WCL’s scholarly publication dedicated to diversity, has begun the Class Partnership Initiative to honor its commitment to publishing high-quality WCL student work. TMA regularly publishes legal articles and essays on intersectionality, politics, and under-examined issues as a non-traditional journal. Because this course is part of the Class Partnership Initiative, the three highest graded capstone papers for the course will be forwarded to TMA at semester’s end.TMA will review the entries as it does for other submissions, and make publication offers to exceptional papers that fall within the scope of TMA’s mission. Students are not at all required to accept a publication offer. Rather, the Class Partnership Initiative is meant to offer students a unique opportunity to adapt their academic papers into published, scholarly work, which is a great professional credential and skill-building experience. Lastly, it is important to note that all students are always encouraged to make submissions to TMA on a year-round basis.
Description
In light of Plato’s expectation that "A society's law book should, in right and reason, prove, when we open it, by far the best and finest work of its whole literature,” what should we make of Shakespeare’s jarring directive (via Dick the Butcher in Henry VI Pt. 2), “First, let’s kill all the lawyers!”? And does Lauren Hill’s observation,
- “Yo, ya’ll cant can't handle the truth
- In a courtroom of lies
- Perjures the jurors
- Witness despised
- Crooked lawyers
- False indictments publicized Its entertainment...the arraignments
- The subpoenas
- High profile gladiators in bloodthirsty arenas.”
made during her 2002 MTV Unplugged performance of “Mysteries of Iniquities” tell us about legal culture, laws and lawyers? What role do their respective legal cultures play in shaping their commentaries?
With materials ranging from Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, images from the beating of Rodney King, clips from My Cousin Vinny, audio files of the music from the anti-war movement of the 60s and 70s, pictures of the AIDS Quilt, post conception intrauterine sonograms, seminar participants in Legal Discourses in Popular Culture will employ an interdisciplinary – multi genre inspection of whether, how and to what extent popular culture informs and is informed by legal discourse.
We will focus our inquires on five central categories or contexts (1) Property and Status (2) Family and Freedom (3) Crime and Identity (4) Health and Warfare (5) Activism and Lawyers. Rather than encourage students to focus on the role law plays in protecting and policing the aspects of popular culture in these contexts, Legal Discourses in Popular Culture students will be asked to reflect on whether and to what extent pop culture constructs and communicates “narratives” about the law, the interests of the parties and legal culture related to the five categories above. In order to further illuminate the dynamic relationship between law and popular culture, students will engage selected theoretical frameworks such as critical legal theory, critical race theory, feminist theory, queer theory, political science and cultural studies.
Students can receive either 2 credits (in-class presentation, reflective paper and class participation) or 3 credit hours (in-class presentation, research paper and class participation) for this seminar. Students who wish to satisfy WCL’s Upper Level Writing Requirement via this seminar may do so by expanding the research paper to meet the ULWR guidelines.
Textbooks and Other Materials
The textbook information on this page was provided by the instructor. Students should use this information when considering purchases from the AU Campus Store or other vendors. Students may check to determine if books are currently available for purchase online.
Required Text: Paul Butler, LET’S GET FREE: A HIP HOP THEORY OF JUSTICE (New Press, 2009). ******Materials may contain explicit language and/or adult themes******
Students must be able to have access to Netflix.com, youtube.com and Hulu.comFirst Class Readings
Not available at this time.