James R. Elkins

Personal Reflections

My father was a hard working man. He lived within his means and wanted little. The one thing he had an eye for was a new car. I was six years old when my mother acquiesced. My father bought a sleek new green ’51 Pontiac Bonneville. Its amber-colored Indian hood ornament is still emblazzed in my memory. That year-of-the-new-car—1951—was itself memorable: I started school, my father drove the new Pontiac off a Mayfield, Kentucky car dealer’s two-car-showroom floor, and we began to frequent the local drive-in theaters. These were the days before we got our first TV—a stodgy Hoffman console model—and after the only movie theater in Benton, seven miles from where we lived, had closed.

Those nights at the drive-in theater I may as well have been in heaven. Best of those evenings were the all-night shows when movies were shown from dusk to dawn, and I fell asleep with movies bleeding into dreams. To get through a night of movies—I’m not sure I ever managed to actually stay awake all night—required pillows and popcorn, a cooler of RC Cola, and sandwiches. We brought the food from home, too frugal to buy anything from the snack-bar.

It was at drive-in theaters that I saw The Robe (1953), Demetrius and the Gladiators (1954), and The Ten Commandants (1956). These lavishly produced Biblical epics reminded us of worlds far beyond our own, as did the Westerns popular in the 1950s: High Noon (1952), Shane (1953), and Bad Day at Black Rock (1955). We had to get to the drive-in early to get a decent parking place to see any of the new release films.

In 1954, I saw my first film in a movie theater. My uncle, Barney Thweatt, who had been on the Brewers Redman basketball team that won the State Championship in 1948 after going undefeated in the regular season, took my brother and I on a Friday to visit his barber. After our haircuts, he decided, for some reason, to take us to the movie theater next door to the barbershop. I have a distinct memory of sitting in velvet silent darkness as we wait for the movie to begin. Lush burgundy curtains are finally pulled aside and I am swept up into a story that leaves me feeling like I am in outer space. I was a witness that afternoon to a story and a world distant from my own, a film world of paradox that makes fiction real and my own life a piece of fiction. In the meandering, turbulent, blessed years that followed that magical afternoon, I have never forgotten watching that first movie-theater film—Johnny Guitar (1953)(starring Sterling Hayden & Joan Crawford). I survived the advent of television, grew up on a western Kentucky farm, was an undergraduate student at Kentucky’s big university, and served the Army during the Vietnam war era. I became a lawyer and a film goer, and eventually, a law teacher. I still live in that Friday afternoon world, still convinced that the world is as movie-like as it is real.

Notes:

<1> A different version of this personal statement appears as the introduction to, James R. Elkins, Reading/Teaching Lawyer Films, 28 Vt. L. Rev. 813 (2004) and a slightly different version appeared in a French journal. [on-line text]

<2> It was Marshall McLuhan who reminded us that “[t]he business of the writer or the film-maker is to transfer the reader or viewer from one world, his own, to another, the world created by typography and film. That is so obvious, and happens so completely, that those undergoing the experience accept it subliminally and without critical awareness.” [Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man 285 (New York: McGraw-Hill Paperback ed., 1965)]

<3> In a series of law school courses and in my writing about these courses, I have tried to focus on the way students become lawyers and in the course of doing so adopt a legal mind-set and take up a legal persona which evolve into a world-view accompanied by a life philosophy enacted in their engagement with clients, others in the legal system, and even in the way they try to understand themselves and the world. I assume that it is the sentiments and philosophy we enact as lawyers that determine the kind of lawyers we will be, how law will be framed and interpreted; for those who seek our help as lawyers. And it is these sentiments and philosophies that give a professional life shape, direction, and meaning.

In previous courses, I sought to explore these themes and how they might play out in the life of the law student (as in their lives as lawyers) by way of literature (“Lawyers and Literature,” “The Legal Imagination”), philosophy (“Practical Moral Philosophy for Lawyers”), psychology (“Psychology for Lawyers,” “Legal Interviewing and Counseling,” “Law and Psychiatry”), and the social sciences (“Introduction to Law”; “Environmental Justice”). In all these courses I sought intellectual frameworks that would allow us to explore the legal world-view and its adaption as a cognitive schema for problem-solving, as a prism by which we see and try to understand the world.

<4> In “Environmental Justice,” a course I taught for several years with my colleague, Pat McGinley, we relied heavily upon documentary films with the understanding that few of our students have ever seen an open-pit mine, a clear-cut forest, or had attended a meeting in which local citizens tried to figure out how to petition their government to protect them from environmental hazards in their community. Our reliance upon films in the Environmental Justice course came before "Erin Brockovich" (2000) or "A Civil Action" (1998) appeared with such great fanfare. "A Civil Action" (1998) was, for many of us, a disappointment after our exposure to the monumental book on which the film was based. Jonathan Harr’s A Civil Action may well be one of the best non-fiction accounts of a lawsuit ever written. See Jonathan Harr, A Civil Action (New York: Random House, 1985). [On environmental law and film, see Christine Alice Corcos, “Who Ya Gonna C(s)ite?” Ghostbusters and the Environmental Regulation Debate, 13 Fl. St. U. J. Land Use & Envir’t L. 231 (1997)[on-line text] and Kelly Lynn Anders, Reviewing Silkwood at 25: The Reel Impact on Environmental Policy, 49 So. Tex. L. Rev. (2007)[on-line text]]