james r. elkins

course writing

One might hope that writing for a film course would be both enjoyable and a learning experience. I will do whatever I can to make it so. It will, I'm afraid, not suffice to simply assign a "course paper." What then are you being asked to do? And why?

If you intend upon doing something safe (well ... relatively safe) and traditional, I have no objection to a research paper. There is an emerging body of legal scholarship (and collections of scholarly essays and books) devoted to law and film, and you are welcome to focus your course writing on a topic or theme and structure it as you would any other research paper.

If you write a traditional course paper, I assume that you have been a student long enough to know what this means and how to do it--select a topic, research the topic, present a thesis, develop your arguments, footnote or provide references for your sources, write in the best prose you can command.

The disadvantage of doing this kind of writing is that you have a double burden in reading and thinking about the course as it is being taught and then taking on the research and writing of a paper that does not draw on the course readings and the course films.

If you are doing a traditional research paper, I expect you to discuss the topic with me (by way of email or an office visit) and receive prior approval for the topic.

An alternative to the research paper is what I call "course writing." A course writing is, quite literally, an essay in which you write the course. In "Reading/Teaching Lawyer Films," 28 Vt. L. Rev. 813 (2004), I have written my version of the course (and yes, it is clearly a teacher's version and thus will look and read differently than a course writing that you might set out to do). I am not, of course, suggesting that you follow or mimic what I have done (the result of several years of teaching "lawyers and film").

What I have in mind for a course writing or course essay (and indeed, it need not be structured like a traditional essay at all) is a writing that allows you to do the following: 1) put to use what you are reading for the course; 2) focus on the films we are watching in the course; 3) pursue particular themes of interest that you find presented in the films (comparing, where applicable, the different treatment of the themes in the various films); and 4) design a writing that makes it possible for you to use the films in a way that helps you explore issues and concerns you may have about lawyers, the legal profession, and your place in the world of law.

So, as an example, you might think about your writing for the course as a response to this most simple (and perhaps, profoundly complex) question: What am I doing here? You might find your answer to the question so simplistic that it can't possibly constitute a way to structure a course writing. (In which case, you be well advised to find another "framing" question.) Or the question might well be a more complex one, a question that fully engages everything you have learned in the course.

As part of your course writing, you might want to address the fact that you are a real movie fan, indeed you might want to claim that a movie (or movies) have played an important part in your life. If so, how did that happen? You might ask, as with the previous question--What am I doing here?--find the question far more difficult to answer than you might have first assumed. Or you might find that your answer is so banal that it is of little interest to you, and thus, would be of little interest to the instructor. Or perhaps, you don't claim to be a movie buff at all, but are simply curious, confused, perplexed or angered by the lawyers you find represented in films. You might want to say, "I'm taking the course not because I'm a film buff, but to try to figure out how to deal with the fact that I've set out to be a lawyer, and all my friends want to talk about is some lawyer that they have seen presented in a film." Or you may have ended up in the course for reasons and by a path only they you could begin to describe. What are you doing here? How are you going to try to describe your reaction and your use of these lawyer films?

I sometimes wonder whether it is not best, when all the explaining and talking is done, to say simply, "I imagined this course and now teach it. The thing for you to do, as a student, is to imagine it for yourself and write an account of your efforts." You should, of course, keep in mind, that by inviting you to write the course, and to chart your own way, I do not mean to: 1) abandon you to your own confused efforts; 2) to suggest that I do not care about what you do; 3) that anything you dream up and write will be fine with me; or 4) that there are not useful criteria for use in evaluating this kind of course writing.

My basic sense is that at the professional school level you should know what it means to write an essay, even if that essay is being described as a "course writing." Moreover, I expect that if you are confused about the idea of an essay/course writing, that you will confer with the instructor, and you will confer at such length as is necessary to figure out what it is that you are expected to do, how it will be evaluated, and how you will go about doing it.

I am sometimes faulted (by students) for not providing sufficient guidance as to what they should write and how it will be evaluated. In lieu of this kind of top-down guidance on what and how to write, I provide a substantial and well-grounded explanation about the course, its history, and how the course readings, course films, and course writings might be viewed as part of your education as a lawyer. In my view, it is this extensive information about the course that should substantially inform you about possible directions your writing might take.

In addition, there are the usual sources of information that you may mine for information about your writing: (i) the questions presented in the opening page of the course web site; (ii) class discussions (which often focus on the fundamental nature of our undertaking: what are we doing here? what should we be doing? how is one to make use of the readings/films we take up?); (iii) instructor reading guides for particular films; (iv) essays and writings on film, on law/lawyers and film, on narrative and myth, and on film studies and film theory, which you can access by way of the course web-pages; (v) film reviews and film criticisms, again available by way of web sites and standard library reference sources; (vi) introductory film theory books; (vii) a good book on exploratory writing, such as Peter Elbow's Writing With Power (New York: Oxford University Press, 2nd ed., 1998); and (viii) an email note to or office visit with the course instructor.

Writing in this course, for whatever problems it may present, is relatively straightforward. It is your responsibility to figure out how you will write the course and how you will demonstrate excellence in the writing.

Further notes:

(i) You, like the instructor, may have no background in film studies and there is no reason to believe you are enrolled in the course because you want to study film per se. This raises the question--what are you doing in the course? And for that matter, what is the instructor doing teaching the course? (I have, for myself, attempted to answer the question.) And one might want to ask: What is this course doing in a law school? (Does it have a place in the curriculum?) If you set out, in a thoughtful and imaginative way, to answer these questions, you would be well on your way to having a paper for the course!

(ii) You may, like the instructor, be a long-time movie fan and you may, in watching films, experience a great deal of pleasure. One might hope that the pleasure we associate with films can be translated into thoughtful, engaging, provocative, and imaginative writing about "lawyers and film." One suspects, however, that translating this love of film into writing is not nearly as simple as one would hope. Indeed, the same pleasure one hopes will provide the engine for good writing may turn on you, leaving you resentful that you must now deal intellectually and academically with an activity once found so pleasurable. (Pleasure and work often take the form of a binary opposition and in doing so create psychological tension. A similar structure of binary oppositions may be at work in lawyer films and you will want to keep an eye out for such oppositions.)

(iii) While film is a medium that calls for its own theories of interpretation, we will assume that a lawyer film is also a "text" and that as a text it can "read" like other literary texts. As a long-standing (and sometimes long-suffering) student, you have been asked throughout your education to read many different kinds of texts and genres, and have developed strategies that make it possible to comprehend and understand these texts. Some students are also more agile and adept at developing new strategies than are others. Some students are more curious and open about "texts" and genres with which they have had no experience than are others; they see in the new, different, strange, and mysterious something of value. The student who knows confidently how to read various "texts" is generally more open and curious about unfamiliar texts, and can translate that curiosity into writing about the texts she reads, than is the student who is resistant and confused by anything new and different.

Paradoxically, law school presents an example of the experience of newness of "texts" and required familiarization with new reading strategies that is similar to what you may experience in reading lawyer films. Of course, law school also systematically and willfully ignores the rich literary possibilities in reading judicial opinions (and other legal texts) and the connection of these new texts to the old ones you have read before law school. Faced with a new, rich, and imaginative body of law texts, the law student is asked to master the law genre as if nothing from her history of reading mattered in the new interpretative enterprise. Some students express disaffection with this basic and erroneous clean-slate assumption; others accept it without giving it a second thought.

(iv) When I first started teaching the film course, I decided to learn more about the field of "film studies." What do film students do when they watch films? What do they try to learn from the films they watch? How are they taught to interpret, critique and understand the films they watch in their courses (assuming that they do, indeed, watch films)? In refocusing these questions for the "lawyers and film" course, they are translated as follows: What happens when law students watch films in which their professions figure so prominently? What are lawyers to learn about their profession and about themselves from lawyer films that cannot be learned in traditional law school course offerings? How do we explain the appearance, the public reception, and proliferation of lawyer films? (What is the public learning about lawyers by way of film?) Do lawyer films constitute a genre (and if so, how can the genre be described)?

More pertinent to our immediate concerns: what are you to do with lawyer films when you write about them? One might assume that with a little prompting and some broad guidance, you should begin, during the early weeks of the course to begin to work with the films and experiment with different ways of trying to talk about them. One might go so far as to say that it is peculiar that you would need or require special instruction on how to proceed. If lawyer films are approached, in a pleasurable and non-threatening way, to explore the question--who am I to be as a lawyer?--then you've undoubtedly got something to write about. When the fundamental question is joined with the more searching and critical questions--and how will the world of law and lawyers make who I want to be possible, and what in the world of law, and in my own life, will undermine my efforts to be the kind of person and lawyer I want to?--then you have questions that directly implicate you and your future in the writing for "lawyers and film."

(v) There is no state board of bar examination questions on "lawyers and film" (although the bar examination and your study for it might be far more interesting if there were). The exciting thing about this course is that it must be created as it is taught.

(vi) I have tried experiments of various sorts to encourage students to think about what it means to become a lawyer. I have written about these pedagogical innovations, explained them to law teachers around the country, and firmly believe that introspective/reflective writing encouraged by writing the course can help one develop needed and unappreciated skills. We talk, in legal education, about teaching you to "think like a lawyer," and the skills associated with "case analysis," "brief writing," and "appellate argument," but we don't bother to teach you to reflect on these activities, and more troubling, we don't try to teach you to focus on what it means to be a lawyer. Many of you will become lawyers unschooled and unskilled in the art of reflection; some of you will be actively disdainful of reflective colleagues. I find that law students are sometimes unnerved by their first efforts at reflection (i.e., they turn out to be deficient in what they think to be an intuitive given), while others welcome the opportunity to learn something about an unpracticed skill.

(vii) I have taken the liberty to present the course by way of a course web site. A web site offers the opportunity to present the equivalent of a course writing and to do it in a way that is visually and aesthetically interesting. The ability to use hypertext links to organize writing in a non-linear fashion and the use of active links to resources and materials available beyond the "text" of the course provides a wonderful opportunity for the creative student.

"Writing a Film Essay: Observations, Arguments, Research, and Analysis," in Timothy Corrigan & Patricia White, The Film Experience: An Introduction 474-516 (Boston: Bedford/St. Martin's, 2004)

John Denvir (ed.), Legal Reelism: Movies as Legal Texts (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1996)

Michael Asimow & Shannon Mader, Law and Popular Culture (New York: Peter Lang, 2004)

[Note: I do not mean to suggest or imply by providing these links to web resources that any of these materials will be of particular value for students in "lawyers and film." I have provided these links to show you, by way of comparison, what students in other film courses are being told about the film writing enterprise.]

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