Hollywood on Trials: Courts and Films, 1930–1960

Abstract

As long as legal scholarship focused on traditional sources that were considered“distinctively legal,” a great variety of “legal texts” were consigned to scholars in other disciplines. Thus, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. (1841–1932) and his classic workThe Common Law(1881) appeared safely inside the categorical “box” identified as distinctively legal, while Louis Calhern's portrayal of Holmes and the filmThe Magnificent Yankee(MGM, 1950) fell outside.In recent years, however, both the inside/outside distinction and the legal box metaphor have become increasingly suspect. Drawing upon post-structuralist theories, which highlight the discursive and representational dimensions of law, a variety of different projects seek to locate the diverse places at which legal rhetoric and imagery are constituted.