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Law, Lawyers, and Popular Culture

1989; The Yale Law Journal Company; Volume: 98; Issue: 8 Linguagem: Inglês

10.2307/796606

1939-8611

Lawrence M. Friedman,

American Sports and Literature

This essay concerns two distinct but related ways in which legal culture intersects with more general social norms, including those norms reflected in popular culture.In the first place, legal culture acts as an intervening variable, a mechanism for transforming norms of popular culture into legal dress and shape.In the second place, legal and popular culture, as images of each other, help explicate and illuminate their respective contents.This essay also examines some instances of popular legal culture.But I will begin with a few words of definition.By legal culture I mean nothing more than the "ideas, attitudes, values, and opinions about law held by people in a society." 1 Everyone in a society has ideas and attitudes, and about a range of subjects-education, crime, the economic system, gender relations, religion.Legal culture refers to those ideas and attitudes which are specifically legal in content-ideas about courts, justice, the police, the Supreme Court, lawyers, and so on.(Obviously, one aspect of legal culture is what problems and institutions are defined as legal in the first place.)The term popular culture, on the other hand, refers first, and more generally, to the norms and values held by ordinary people, or at any rate, by non-intellectuals, as opposed to high culture, the culture of intellectuals and the intelligentsia, or what Robert Gordon has called "mandarin culture."' Second, and more narrowly, it refers to "culture" in the sense of books, songs, movies, plays, television shows, and the like; but specifically to those works of imagination whose intended audience is the public as a whole, rather than the intelligentsia: Elvis rather than Marilyn Horne. 3