genre

James R. Elkins

Do lawyer films constitute a film genre and if so, how is it to be described? David Chandler, in "Introduction to Genre Theory" poses some questions about genre, which I would reformulate for our purposes as follows:

What films have you seen to suggest the existence of a lawyers film genre? (During the course of a semester of watching lawyer films do you begin to get the notion that such a genre exists?)

What expectations do you have when you watch a lawyer film?

What conventions do you find present in lawyer films? How do these genre conventions shape and constrain the meaning you attribute to the film?

Are there social, political, ideological perspectives you expect to find expressed (or embedded) in lawyer films?

What purposes do the lawyer genre (assuming the existence of such a genre) serve?

What “pleasures” do you associate with watching lawyer films?

To what audience are lawyer films directed?

What do we learn, if anything, in taking up stories we already know, that is, genre stories in which we know even as we set out, how they will progress and how they will be brought to a necessary end?

These questions, prompted by and adapted from David Chandler's work on genre theory should set us to thinking about the lawyer film genre. I ask again: Does such a genre exist? If so, what are its narrative conventions? What can lawyers learn from the genre (if indeed it exists and one can expect lawyers to learn from such texts)?

[The Conventional View: “There is no ‘lawyer movie’ genre, although reviewers often use the phrase ‘courtroom drama’ when most of the action takes place at trial. Lawyers appear in dramas, musicals, science fiction films, action-filled adventures, mysteries, Westerns, thrillers, and comedies from slapstick to sinister.” Rebecca Porter, Lawyers on the Big Screen, 38 Trial 54 (March, 2002)]

There is, I think, a consensus, at least among legal film critics, that trial or courtroom drama films are likely candidates for genre status, although the genre has not been more broadly widely recognized among film critics. We do not, as yet, have a scholarly definition of either a legal film or lawyer film genre, and thus my temptation to offer the the preliminary outlines of one here.

I am particularly interested in lawyer films, and I argue that they should be considered, for genre purposes, as more clearly defined than a broad array of films that have legal and jurisprudential significance.

In my view, it will be lawyer films rather than the courtroom drama genre that will prove the greater value to students of law. Let me explain: Law schools take as one of their several missions the education and training of the student as not just a future lawyer but a litigator, a man or woman who can walk into the courtroom and try a case, civil or criminal. It is scenes of the lawyer in the courtroom—Atticus Finch (Gregory Peck) in "To Kill a Mockingbird" (film and novel), Frank Galvin (Paul Neuman) in "The Verdict," Arthur Kirland (Al Pacino) in "And Justice for All"—that lodge themselves in memory just as did the heroes in Western films are forever rooted in my memories as a young boy. While Atticus Finch, Frank Galvin, and Arthur Kirkland shape our mythic sense of the lawyer, there is the trace of the archetype of the hero and a narrative structure to support the hero in virtually every lawyer film. For those who are less enamored with the hero in film, we might say this: The lawyer film does what law school does not borrow or pretend to do—it tells us that the lawyer lives in a world beyond the courtroom and beyond law, that no lawyer is immune to the sins, villains, and evils of the world, and that not being immune makes us human and makes us characters in dramas worth seeing---again and again and again. It is, in how we go about living with the law (and without it, see, e.g., "Cape Fear," either version, 1991, or 1962), what we find we know about law and life (and what we learn we know of neither), and who we become as lawyers and what law makes of us as a person, that we begin to find a significant pedagogical use of lawyer films.

So, let me venture forth here with a working thesis: There is a lawyer film genre and its structural features as a genre can be described as follows:

the film’s protagonist, central character, or narrator is a lawyer (the villain in the film may also be a lawyer, as may other characters in the film);

the film presents the lawyer engaged in professional work (or having once been a lawyer and having been so features prominently in the film);

the lawyer’s work (and the ordinary world in which that work takes place) has been significantly disrupted either by a client’s case or cause, or by some feature of the lawyer’s work, or his/her life in the law firm, or by some event in the lawyer’s personal life;

the ordinary world of the lawyer (which, of course the film viewer may find “ordinary” only to the lawyer!) is subject to a significant threat (which entails lose of the client’s case, or loss of professional status/marriage/family from actions of the client, agents of the client, or the lawyer himself), a threat to the lawyer's ordinary world and ordinary (or extraordinary) life;

the threat of confusion, dissolution, loss, uncontrolled outrage, craziness (or other forms of harm to self and others) must be addressed, and it gets addressed by the lawyer's resort to professional and personal resources related to the character's work as a lawyer; and in addressing the threat, the lawyer’s work and the meaning of that work is at stake (as are other things of value);

the lawyer may, during the course of the drama that ensues from the upending of his ordinary world (in law and in life), be involved in litigation that culminates in dramatic courtroom scenes (a courtroom drama that may play a significant part in the film, so significant that the narrative, and the film is defined by the courtroom drama as the central feature of the film;

the lawyer’s courtroom battles, engagements with clients, and efforts to marshal his or her own psychological resources encounter substantial obstacles, and in the deployment of his/her resources, and the inevitable failures to immediately prevail, we find the lawyer engaged in something akin to a heroic journey.

Basically then, what we find in lawyer films is a four part narrative structure:

:: 1 When we first view the lawyer and his world, we find a person and a world that we know cannot last, alas, something must change, the lawyer must become real and human, and to do so the lawyer must learn what he/she does not know.

Thus we are presented the lawyer and his world:

the lawyer is a fallen warrior, his world in disarray (Frank Galvin in "The Verdict")(Parnell Emmett McCarthy, a side-kick, in "Anatomy of a Murder");

the lawyer is a rising star (Kevin Lomax in "The Devil’s Advocate")(Jake Brigance "A Time to Kill")(Maggie Ward in "Class Action")(and if not a "rising star," a man who can arise to the occasion; Vinnie Gambini in "My Cousin Vinny")

the lawyer is a thoroughly established man or woman in the community, or the community of lawyers (Atticus Finch in "To Kill a Mockingbird")(Paul Biegler in "Anatomy of a Murder")(Adam Bonner and Amanda Bonner in "Adam's Rib");

the lawyer is already a shining star (Martin Vail in "Primal Fear")(Jan Schlichtmann in "A Civil Action")(Jedediah Tucker Ward in "Class Action")

the lawyer is not where he's been or quite where he's going, or in is a mid-life crisis (Paul Biegler in "Anatomy of a Murder") (Mitchell Stevens" in "The Sweet Hereafter"),

the lawyer is neither fallen nor a star, neither firmly established in a community or a social outlaw, but inhabits an endless world of routine, personal and legal (Arthur Kirland in "And Justice for All")(Kathleen Riley in "Suspect")(Ed Masry in "Erin Brockovich")(note: neither fallen/nor star is a characterization, and general state of affairs for many of the secondary lawyers who appear in supporting and diversionary roles in lawyer films, although we might note that secondary lawyer characters may be either mentors (and side-kicks) to the protagonist or may betray the protagonist as he/she tries to learn what must be learned to grow, to change, and to become more human).

:: 2 The lawyer’s world—fallen, rising or descending, stuck at mid-life or in a lawyer’s routines—this world, this present world, and present state of things (ordinary, odd, or crazy as they may be) must now be disrupted (by one or a series of events), most often by the appearance of a particular client or a character-defining or future-defining case, an appearance (of client/case/event which moves the character, and the story, from the opening state of affairs (whether settled or in disarray) toward a reconfigured order of existence (even though the new order may itself be a form disorder, see e.g., Arthur Kirkland in "And Justice for All"; Frank Galvin in "The Verdict"; Mitchell Stevens in "The Sweet Hereafter").

:: 3 The “fallen” lawyer must seek, against opposition and by overcoming obstacles, a more secure place in the world, that is, the “fallen” lawyer must seek redemption. The path of the rising star is threatened by obstacles and opposition that block the ascent and threaten a reversal. The star’s place at the top of the heap is questioned or challenged, and may, either temporarily or permanently, be altered. A mid-life crises of manageable proportion must be threatened by more serious threats. The everyday, routine work of the lawyer must in some way become extraordinary, as in "And Justice for All," or with Amanda Bonner’s decision to take a case in which she opposes her husband, Adam Bonner in "Adam’s Rib."

:: 4 With the lawyer’s world, and central place of his work in that world established (or with the promise of establishment), and then what is established threatened, the lawyer must respond (in more or less ethically acceptable ways) to the challenge presented. The nature of the response turns on the lawyer’s character. The response leads to a resolution and the reordering of the lawyer’s world, or to a new life beyond (or secure within) law’s reach.

[revised: Jan. 8, 2009]

A concluding note: I have tried to define a specific kind of legal film in which there is a particular focus on the lawyer and the lawyer’s world. A film may, of course, feature a lawyer and still not be a part of the lawyer film genre, and there are both legal and courtroom dramas that focus on law and the larger world within which a lawyers’ work takes place, films that might properly be called legal films, films with jurisprudential significance, that I would not include the lawyer film genre.

[These ideas on the lawyer film genre were first published in James R. Elkins, Reading/Teaching lawyer Films, 28 Vt. L. Rev. 813 (2004) [on-line text] and have been revised for presentation here.]

<1> On the Film-Theory discussion group (Spoon Collective, University of Virginia) someone says, "I have a question: What is a genre?" The responses from a group of sophisticated film enthusiasts (and film studies teachers) were not all that instructive. I was able to distill only two comments (which I have taken the liberty to edit) of interest:

"I would use the term [genre] if the films use similar narrative conventions. Genre is based on narrative form—how time and space are used to tell a story. The setting itself is not, in my view, enough to constitute a genre or story type."

A genre depends upon a community or reader/users.

<2> Notes on genre from Michael Ryan and Douglas Kellner, Camera Politica: The Politics and Ideology of Contemporary Hollywood Film (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988):

"Form inheres in the very substance of social life. Form not only determines cognition, how one experiences the world; it also determines the shape of social institutions, practices, and values." [267]

"Genres hold the world in place, establishing and enforcing a sense of propriety, of proper boundaries which demarcate appropriate thought, feeling, and behavior and which provide frames, codes, and signs for constructing a shared social reality. We are speaking now of genres in a broad sense which includes the different areas of social behavior—public as well as private. Each area is a locus of conventionally determined behavior. . . . Film genres participate in this process by sorting out the different values and ideals a social order requires to be internalized if it is to survive. The traditional western, for example, aided the construction of a social reality in which it was believed that males appropriately dominated the public sphere, while the traditional melodrama constructed a social reality, a commonly held set of precepts, attitudes, and beliefs, which promoted the domestic sphere as the one appropriate to women." [77]

"Genres depend on receptive audiences who are willing to grant credibility to the conventions of the genre to the extent that those conventions become invisible. Once that is accomplished the generic illusion can assume the character of verisimilitude. It no longer seems to be constituted through the manipulation of coded formulae. A certain occlusion of rhetoric and convention, therefore, is crucial to the successful transmission of ideological beliefs to the audience. What this means, however, is that once the generic conventions are foregrounded, the genre can no longer operate successfully as a purveyor of ideology. The conventions become unstable and variable; history increasingly intervenes in the realm of myth; and the generic signifiers themselves increasingly become signifieds, the referents of films rather than the active agents of cinematic practice, a matter of content rather than a vital form." [78]

"All genres create a tradition that can become an object to be cited, an occasion for reflexivity." [79] The authors give an example of Westerns which had, they contend by the early 70s tended "either to demystify the myth of the West or to depict the closing of the frontier and the end of the mythic space of the traditional western (Will Penny, Monte Walsh, etc.). During this period, the western undergoes a process whereby its conventions are made visible; it increasingly assumes the form of a tradition that is reflected on and referred to in film." [79-80]

"The eclipse of the western was thus fostered both by the subversion of its generic conventions and by its exhaustion as a mode of ideological legitimization." [81]

One might also see something of the film noir genre in lawyer films. Ryan and Kellner note that:

"Traditionally the film noir of the late forties and early fifties depicts a dark world of contending, sometimes ambiguous, moral forces, in which deception, treachery, and murder are commonplace. Dialog is frequently abrasive, and the style is usually characterized by night shooting, dark shadows, sharp lighting contrasts, askew camera angles, symbolic environments and convoluted narratives. . . . These films frequently feature detectives who operate on the edge of the law as hard-bitten loners only marginally able to relate to women (who are frequently the source of evil). The films usually expose corrupt wealth and power; crime and business often seem interchangeable." [83]

"Indeed, the noir world is characterized by crossed boundaries." [83]

"The contemporary noir revivals can be said to pertain . . . to that strain of populist distrust or loss of confidence. . . . The rich and powerful are usually portrayed as corrupt. . . . [84]

<3> "The genre is a network of codes that can be inferred from a set of related texts. A genre is as real as a language and exerts similar pressures through its network of codes, meeting similar instances of stolid conformity and playful challenge. No one who has ever studied seriously the history of any art can doubt the importance of precedent, schema, presupposition, convention—all those things that in literary study we call genre and style—in the actual production of texts. The more one knows about a given historical situation the more one realizes the struggle behind even the smallest innovations in any art or craft, a struggle first to master and then to transcend a given generic or stylistic practice." [Robert Scholes, Textual Power: Literary Theory and the Teaching of English 3 (New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press, 1985)]

<4> "The genre film meant reassurance to the audience. They knew what they were going to get." [David Mamet, Bambi vs. Godzilla: On the Nature, Purpose, and Practice of the Movie Business xi (New York: Random House/Vintage Books, 2008)]

<5> “The fascination with the trial and courtroom warriors runs deep in American culture. The trial ritual offers wonderful cinematic possibilities of tension and drama. In addition, in America, which lacks a state religion, law and depictions of judges as minions of the secular god (law) have become a national substitute for the universal church.” [Lawrence Fleischer, Book Review, New York L. J., October 1, 1996 (reviewing Paul Bergman & Michael Asimow, Reel Justice: The Courtroom Goes to the Movies)]

Steve Greenfield & Guy Osborn relate the trial/courtroom genre to what they call the “theatre of law” and note that:

The courtroom has long been used as a vehicle for drama. It is an arena in which dramatic tension can easily be built, and with the added ease of constructing grand soliloquy and speech. This trend is echoed in film portrayals and advocacy offers the chance for an actor to display great oratory. Historically, the classic law film has revolved around a formal and serious courtroom drama with clear identification of the search for justice. Prime examples of the genre include Young Mr Lincoln ,To Kill A Mockingbird, Inherit the Wind, and through to more contemporary examples such as Suspect, The Verdict and Philadelphia. In addition, films such as Brothers in Law and My Cousin Vinny have ploughed the comedic quality of lawyers and legal process.

[Steve Greenfield & Guy Osborn, Film, Law and the Delivery of Justice: The Case of Judge Dredd and the Disappearing Courtroom, 6 (2) J. Crim. Just. & Pop. Culture 35, 36 (1999)] [on-line text]

Greenfield and Osborn, go on to point out, that while we may use the trial/courtroom feature of the film for placement in the legal film genre, these films are all “open to broader meanings and interpretations.” And it may well be these “broader meanings” that give legal films lasting significance for one's legal education.

<6> The lawyer film genre is inexorably linked to other legal films, and particularly, the courtroom drama. However, as the scholarly work on lawyer films evolves, we may find legal scholars drawing upon the Western, detective, crime, and film noir genres to provide descriptive elements of a lawyer film genre. Anthony Chase notes that “[t]he overlap between the legal genre and a host of others (crime, gangster, prison, melodrama, western, science fiction, social science fiction, slapstick comedy, and so forth) immediately complicates the question in interesting ways.” [Anthony Chase, Civil Action Cinema, 1999 L. Rev. MSU-DCL 945] Chase goes on to note that:

Popular fascination with crime, in short, gives you bestselling mysteries: professional fascination with crime, devoid of sentiment, gives you the defense lawyer. Considering the public’s addiction toe facts of crime, it is hardly surprising that the legal trial genre is dominated by the high drama of criminal trials. But the professional and moral predicament faced by the defense attorney with a guilty client (Knock on Any Door, And Justice for All, Compulsion, Jagged Edge, Criminal law, Guilty as Sin, Primal Fear), is only one subcategory of the criminal trial film. Perhaps more familiar, or at least traditional, is the heroic tale of a defender who represents the innocent (Young Mr. Lincoln, To Kill a Mockingbird, Suspect, Presumed Innocent). And just as it would be a mistake to collapse the legal genre itself into trial films, it would also be erroneous to believe that criminal trials exhaust the cannon of courtroom confrontation in fiction and film. There is still the civil side. [Id. at 947-948]

On the Western as a parallel genre to the lawyer film, consider that the Western involved protagonists engaged in the fundamental struggle over law and order, the struggle takes place in a world both harsh and brutal, the forces associated with good and evil readily be identified, and the individual who most distinctly stands out in this social world is the man and woman with courage. The West in film is

a place where simple survival was difficult, a place where nature was uncompromising, just as society had been uncompromising in the places they had left. The West offered the possibility of a new beginning, of re-founding, of establishing governments from reflection and choice, rather than mishaps of birth and tradition. In the West, it was thought, they had it in their power to make the world over again. But the Western movie showed that even in a new land, the law was not easily established on principles of justice and the common good. [John Marini, Western Justice: John Ford and Sam Peckinpah on the Defense of the Heroic, 6 Nexus: J. of Opinion 57 (Spring, 2001)]

Marini goes on to note that

The Western, therefore, could raise the question concerning the supposed virtues of progress, and the forces–perhaps more virtuous–opposed to it. It did not take the superiority of civilization for granted. The law, and civilization, too, had to justify itself in an almost philosophic way. It is for this reason that the appeal of the Western was a universal, not just an American, phenomenon. [Id. at 58]

On the Western genre, its narrative conventions, structural components, and mythic significance, see generally Will Wright, Sixguns & Society: A Structural Study of the Western (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975). Will Wright’s Sixguns & Society is required reading for anyone seeking to do genre work on legal and lawyer films.

For an effort to draw parallels between film noir and legal films, see Norman Rosenberg, “Film Noir,” in John Denvir (ed.), Legal Reelism: Movies as Legal Texts 280-302 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1996).

<7> Kristin Thompson observes that “Hollywood protagonists tend to be active, to seek out goals and pursue them rather than having goals simply thrust upon them. Almost invariably, the protagonist’s goals define the main lines of action.” [Kristin Thompson, Storytelling in the New Hollywood: Understanding Classical Narrative Technique 14 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999)]

The protagonist in a lawyer film provides a different perspective on this fundamental narrative convention in that the lawyer’s goals and pursuits are often defined by a client and a client’s cause. It is the client and/or the cause that places the lawyer in conflict with others (or with himself).

<8> The lawyer may, in some lawyer films, be acting as a surrogate, agent, or representative for a client whose ordinary world has been significantly disrupted and whose character/identity/work are at stake and who then seeks reparation of his situation by the lawyer’s resort to legal remedies.

<9> The lawyer, in confronting enemies (who are the sources and causes of the disruption in his life, in his work, or his client’s life/work), and in using his tools/resources/character as a lawyer, ends up implicating larger social institutions (law, judiciary, police, government, corporations). “Storytelling . . . is always the story of the individual in some sort of relationship to his social, political, or cultural environment. He can found that environment, he can civilize it, he can find it confusing, or he can hate it: but the basic terms of story are, like the basic terms of any human being’s relationship to his world . . . .” [Frank McConnell, Storytelling and Mythmaking: Images From Film and Literature 6 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979)(It was Frank McConnell who reminded us that, "Even at the most unredeemed level of ‘escapist’ entertainment, cheap novels or trash films, the didactic force of storytelling is still present and important. What kind of world does a person want to escape to?” Id. at 4)]

<10> "L.A. Law" marked a substantially different kind of lawyer tv drama, “different in that it focused on the ethical and personal lives of lawyers. Where Perry Mason had been a detective hero, always seeing to it that the innocent were acquitted, L.A. Law showed lawyers at times working hard to acquit the guilty, at all times working hard to make lots of money, and rarely working hard to follow strict legal ethics.” [Charles B. Rosenberg, The Myth of Perfection, 24 Nova L. Rev. 641, 644 (2000)(the format of L.A. Law was, according to Rosenberg, a “mix of the personal and the substantive.” Id.) L.A. Law aired in the fall of 1986, ran for eight years (1986-1994), and was “the first true ‘blockbuster’ legal show, watched some weeks by as many as forty million people.” Id. at 644.]

We find the precursor of "L.A. Law" in earlier lawyer films, in particular "Anatomy of a Murder" (1959)(work of an admirable lawyer for a client we assume is guilty); "The Verdict" (1982)(a lawyer, Frank Galvin, whose personal and professional life is in substantial disarray, and who engages in questionable ethical conduct, although his civil client is deserving). If it is the “ethical and personal lives of lawyers” that marks the modern turn in lawyer films, the development might be traced to "Adam’s Rib" (1949) and "To Kill a Mockingbird" (1962).

<11> In lawyer films, we often see lawyers at the top of their form, high and mighty, and we expect them to take a fall, to learn they missed something along the way, that even the high and the mighty still have something to learn, something their success may have helped them avoid learning, indeed a success that features in their delusions about themselves and their world.

<12> Genres are boxes, types, a means of categorizing. They constitute in the whole, a typology. They are a way for producers to create something they know a consumer has an affinity for wanting. (Film genres are associated with the early days of Hollywood movie-making.)

Think about how topologizing works. We start with the question: is there a genre that we might call lawyer films? We find references to legal films and courtroom drama films, and we see reference to legal films as being a sub-genre of genre classifications of films generally. We make a topology within a typology with a typology: lawyer film-legal films-films-texts. And we are led back, perhaps not in an infinite regress, but to fundamental divisions, things readable and things not, things knowable and things not, things classifiable and things not.

Bibliographical Sources

General: Rick Altman, Film/Genre (London: British Film Institute, 1989); Arthur Asa Berger, Popular Culture Genre: Theories and Texts (Beverly Hills, California: Sage, 1992); Nick Browne (ed.), Refiguring American Film Genres: Theory and History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998); Barry Keith Grant (ed.), Film Genre III (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2003); Barry Landrum, Film Genre: Hollywood and Beyond (Scotland: Edinburgh University Press, 2005); Steve Neal, Genre and Hollywood (New York: Routledge,1989)

Legal: "A Question of Genre: Jagged Edge and Guilty as Sin," in Cynthia Lucia, Framing Female Lawyers: Women on Trial in Film 102-127 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2005)

Internet Resources

Genre

Film Genre
Wikipedia

Legal Drama
Wikipedia

Trial Movies
Wikipedia

12 Best Trial Movies
ABA Journal

An Introduction to Genre Theory
David Chandler -- University of Aberystwyth media studies

Genre
Introduction to the concept of genre

Film and Genre
Film Education (United Kingdom)

The Field of Genre and Australian Filmic Texts
Carol Laseur -- dissertation, communications studies, 1989

Generic Conventions and Genre Evolution
Stephen Rowley, 1998

Genre, Auteurism, and Spielberg
Stephen Rowley, 1998

Film Genre
Tim Dirk -- classifcations and categories

Choosing a Genre
Dorian Scott Cole -- Writers Workshop Script Doctor

Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit—Conventions and Genre
Genre in literature

What's My Genre?
John Truby

Genre Worksheet

Film Noir

"Film noir is the conjunction of violence and irony . . . ."

—David Mamet, Bambi vs. Godzilla: On the Nature, Purpose, and Practice of the Movie Business 145 (New York: Random House/Vintage Books, 2008)

See: Norman Rosenberg, "Law Noir," in John Denvir (ed.), Legal Reelism: Movies as Legal Texts 280-302 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1996)

Film Noir
Wikipedia

Film Noir
Tim Dirks-Filmsite.org

Ten Shades of Noir
Images Journal

Does Film Noir Mirror the Culture of Contemporary America?
Lise Hordnes

Paint It Black: Understanding Film Noir
Classic Film Pages

Narrative Innovations in Film Noir

Film Noir Reader

Film Noir and Film Noir Heritage

High Heels on Wet Pavement: Film Noir and the Femme Fatale

No Place for a Woman: The Family in Film Noir and Other Essays

Film Noir: "You sure you don't see what you hear?"

Film Noir and Genre Theory

Bibliography: Film Noir: A Bibliography of Materials in the UC Berkeley Library. See also: Paul Duncan, Film Noir (Pocketessentials, 2000).

The Western

The Western: An Overview

Phenomenology of the Western

Genre and the Western
a study guide

Western Films

Western (Genre)
Wikipedia

30 Great Westerns

See generally: Will Wright’s Sixguns & Society: A Structural Study of the Western (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975)

On law and Westerns: Francis Nevins, "Westerns," in Robert M. Jarvis & Paul R. Joseph (eds.), Prime Time Law: Fictional Television as Legal Narrative 189-217 (Durham, North Carolina: Carolina Academic Press, 1998); Mary Nichols, Law and the Western: High Noon, 22 Legal Stud. F. 591 (1998) [on-line text]