Architectures of Justice: The Private and the Privatised
Professor John
Brigham Return
to current issue
Political Science Department
University of
Massachusetts, Amherst
The editors told me that I could not write on Court TV because the
book was going to deal with fictionalised programs. I debated this
situation for a while, particularly the distinction between truth and
fiction. After all, the O.J. Simpson criminal trial had just concluded
and the distinction between truth and falsity seemed rather old
fashioned. But, the organisers appeared to be industrious and they
convinced me that this would be a project worth being part of.
Ultimately I agreed to write about LA Law, the American program
that dealt with a Los Angeles law firm and aired in prime time between
1986 and 1992.
The
Introduction
Two years ago I was
asked to contribute a chapter to a book1 about how law
was depicted on television in the United States. There had recently been
a very successful book length collection on law in the movies and some
of my colleagues thought this was a precedent. The new book about law on
TV was to be divided by chapters each representing a single program.
Each contributor would choose a show to watch. I said yes to the
invitation in principle and began to negotiate over which show I would
do. Being a social scientist and not a student of the theatre I proposed
studying Court TV, the 24 hour television network in the US devoted to
courtroom drama and sometimes the law more generally.
The TV
Courtroom The expression of the law in the courtroom is on a human scale.
Rather than massive bronze doors, larger than life statuary and the
aspirational scale of Olympian (or Victorian) motifs of court buildings,
the inside of the courtroom has always been a key form of
jurisprudential expression. Inside, we have the elevated bench, the
positioning of opposing counsel side by side with the prosecution
nearest the jury who are themselves set apart from the rest and close to
one another. And the gallery is present and separate. In LA Law,
the center aisle, the judges bench and the witness stand become focal
points for the action. This is a lawyers show, not a judge show (like
Sea Change or Night Court) and the lawyers interact with
each other at the crucial juncture where the center aisle crosses the
bar of the counsel tables. Witnesses and defendants are necessary for
the interaction between the lawyers which goes on before, during and
after the trial. Like Perry Mason, LA Law featured important
players in the prosecuting role and while they would initially be
outside the firm, they might be brought into the private sector which on
this show seemed bigger and certainly more substantial than the public.
Like court buildings themselves,
TV courtrooms reflect a time and place. This is not simply the time and
place of the trial, but of the architecture. The United States Supreme
Court's chamber, though built during the Depression, reflects the
Victorian grandeur of an earlier age. Architecturally, and now with
enduring significance, the Victorian is a familiar expression of law.
Like the quill pen and the gavel, the Victorian courtroom has a special
traditional place. But the contemporary courtrooms to which we have had
so much video access of late are not the Victorian courtrooms of law's
traditional shrines. We are getting used to the more austere, functional
courtrooms of our newer cities. In a twist on the old double
institutionalisation thesis, On the episode of LA Law titled "Wattsamatter" which aired in
1990, a courtroom becomes the focus for a segment of the show and the
place of the room in society is a matter for comment. The episode opens
with a judge looking at his courtroom after a Watts type riot has
trashed it. The judge observes, "The American courtroom is a reflection
of American society and society is a reflection of it". Presumably, this
comment is meant for the law as much as for the courtroom. Anyone who
has visited an American courtroom can see that is it hardly
representative of America with its over population of people of color
and relative absence of people of means. And, we know that the
courtroom is not representative of the law, at least not in the sense
that most or even typical cases go to court or that disputes decided in
court are decided the same way most cases are decided. Still, the
courtroom does represent a public perception of the law and on LA
Law at least a few of the attorneys return to the court for their
legal reality check.
Go to top of page
The L.A. courtroom also epitomises the penetration of law in the culture
as something situated in the interior relations of our mental and
emotional lives. Rather than standing "bone white...." on a hill behind
the Capitol as the Supreme Court does, the courtrooms of TV are places
we enter from the holding cell or approach as from the litigants' bench
or view from the jury box. All angles reflect the constituted points of
view the law defines for us. While our court houses are seen from
cultural spaces not generally defined in law, streets, parks, parking
lots, the spaces of television courtrooms are constituted inside the
law. In Imagining
Crime, Some Realism Realism is part of the phenomena of expanding the reach of legal
practice from the courtroom to the boardroom. I am suggesting here, as
my colleague Christine Harrington and I have before, that Realism is the
new paradigm for legal authority, at least in the United
States. Go to top of page
On television, Los Angeles glitz is often juxtaposed
with the grit and grunge of New York, Boston and Philadelphia. Before
and after LA Law Stephen Bochco, its producer, hung out in the
graffitti covered precincts of New York and David Kelley, a Boston
lawyer who went to Hollywood to write for LA Law recently
previewed The Practice, described by U.S. News and World
Report, on March 3, 1997, as "a grunge update of LA
Law." In matters of law, like in other social forms such as entertainment
and education, patterns of behavior are shared across professional
boundaries. Ways of doing things in one area are often reflected in
others. In this sense, some of the law on television becomes the law in
our lives. Indeed like Martin Shapiro's notion that the public policy of
one generation is the political theory of the generation
before, Commenting on the relationship of form in law to form in another area
of social life, cultural studies scholars describe the psychotherapeutic
films of the 1940s such as Spellbound and Shadow of a
Doubt as vulgarisations of Freudian theory. They argue that these
films copy the traditions of the crime drama with their interrogations
and often spontaneous revelations on the witness stand. On LA Law,nearly every episode juxtaposed the courtroom,
lacking in artifice, spare and businesslike in character, with the
relative opulence of the law offices and the luncheon venues to which
the attorneys were inevitably drawn. In the second part of the Premier
episode, which is screened in September of 1986, Sifuentes, McKenzie
Brackman seeks Situentes, played by Jimmy Smits, as a new attorney. He
is taken to a very expensive lunch where much is made of the unfamiliar
surroundings and the use of the restaurant’s opulence as an
inducement to come to the firm. In another early episode, Arnie Becker
goes to an expensive lunch with a beautiful potential client to instruct
her as to the realities of the divorce process. Though he picks up the
tab for the meal it is clear to all but the client that she will be
charged for it. To some extent this positioning links the activity in
the court rooms with the law's traditional venues and distinguishes them
from the more integrated spaces of the new legal practice where law is
done between golf swings, bits of salad or while getting the car out of
valet parking. Go to top of
page
The courtroom in LA Law is subordinate to the boardroom.
Recurring in the opening of each episode, the boardroom, with its long
table around which attorneys gather to discuss business, becomes the
unifying frame for the show. This form is more common on LA Law
than the courtroom and it serves as a prominent and realistic expression
of the corporate core of modern law. In the boardroom, like the
courtroom, participants have places that relate to status. In one show,
Kelsey fights with a new attorney over her traditional place at the
table. Leland McKenzie, the head of the firm, is at the head of the
table. With its glass walls, the boardroom looks out to the firm where
the staff can see but not hear and the special place of those allowed to
participate is affirmed. This affirmation is through the transparency of
the walls and it works as well as any leather covered doors did in the
past to depict an inner sanctum. Against this manifestation of Realism,
the courtroom is a formal setting that allows contemporary authority to
be embedded in the enthusiasms of Realisms where everyone thinks they
are part of the action.
After the Law
While elements of the Kafkaesque scene of standing before the law are
characteristic of the TV courtroom, for the most part, the fact of being
in the presence of a judge where the business of justice is done, as
opposed to Joseph K.'s odyssey in the darkened halls and forbidding
architectural landscape of The Trial, sets the TV courtroom apart from
the alienated vision of the great Czech writer and influential visionary
for a generation of law's critics.
The courtrooms in LA Law served for both criminal and civil
cases, like the firm itself; indeed, like "the law". Since
the firm was primarily a civil law operation, defending criminal cases
was generally connected to the client base, an errant child of a wealthy
corporate executive, a divorce client who takes retribution too
literally. Here, the reality of the show runs against tradition. While
crime has dominated fictionalised law in the past, LA Law shifted
our attention to the law that we are used to seeing in the headlines or
that we learn about in the liberal arts curriculum in college. This is
the law of divorce, personnel, and corporate power. It is also the law
of The People's Court, the Thomas and Bork Hearings, and now, Jones v.
Clinton. This is the law of Ann Kelsey's feminism and Arnie Becker's
divorces, as well as Douglas Brackman's bottom line and Leland
McKenzie's corporate stewardship. It is not much more representative of
the full range of the law or of social life but it may indeed be an
indication of the constitutive power of television that the presentation
of this slice of life in the law caused us to see the law differently.
Recent commentary on television has
problematised reality at the same time that it has heralded the
significance of the medium for serious students of culture. John Fiske
says a TV show is "‘realistic’ not because it reproduces
reality, which it clearly does not, but because it reproduces the
dominant sense of reality". Go to top of page Skyscrapers and Boardrooms But I had been contracted to look at the courtroom and I was
interested in architecture, or at least interior design, and not
theatre. I pushed ahead with the observations I have just made and the
book is to come out in the next month in the United States so I feel
like I have done my job. But, since I have begun to prepare for the
conference at which this paper was originally delivered, I have
rethought my perserverance and believe perhaps that it missed something.
This thought occured to me after I had been in Melbourne for a few
months. Law in LA was now part of my past and the essay on the courtroom
had gone to press. I had been learning to negotiate trams, with and
without conductors. I had been to the old gaol (with its old courthouse
next door); I had been to the universities, and to the Casino, to the
MCG and to the Great Ocean Road. By the time I began to think about this
presentation I knew a lot about Melbourne but I had not had much to do
with its courts. I had not been to or even crossed paths with the heart
of Melbourne's judicial process.
When I began exploring the courts, I discovered the magnificent
Supreme Court of Victoria built on William Street in 1884 which is at
the center of the court complex including the High Court, the
Magistrates' Court and the County Court. I noted efforts in the
Magistrates' Court to become user friendly and in the County Court the
absence of public spaces. These were impressive buildings, but with all
due respect to my colleagues, I was struck in a comparative sense by how
they had shrunk from their former grandeur relative to the built
environment around them. Melbourne is a city where the Victorian
generally holds its own with the architecture of the 20th century. But
this city once dominated by its public buildings is increasingly imposed
upon by the buildings of the private commercial sphere, by the big firms
and the big retailers. This observation has been echoed in other parts
of the academy. Big and Little Power
Go to top of page The central locations of big
power, the state and capital, are, according to Foucault, no longer the
defining characteristics of power. Instead, "small power" located in
dispersed sites has become central to the way power is
constituted. Foucault did not merely add new aspects of a social power to our
understanding of law. He, and his adherents, tended to change the entire
image of modern law from that of pomp and circumstance to the scanner at
the checkout counter. This was a dramatic contribution and it diminished
still functional mechanisms like the police and the authority of Heads
of State. Scholars Alan Hunt and Gary Wickham describe the resulting
image of law and the state which Foucault contributed: ...Foucault's image of modern law is one of a mechanism that is
ineffectual and generally epiphenomenal, confined mainly to providing
legitimations for the disciplinary technologies and normalising
practices established by other mechanisms. Paradoxically, this development occurred just as mainstream social
science was "bringing the State back in" to the picture.
One result of this perspective was to draw attention away from
traditional forms of power, like law. This was a significant weakness.
It has not gone unmentioned, even though the implications have often
been ignored. As Hunt and Wickham put it, "The weakness of Foucault's
project is that in putting 'little power' on to the agenda, he appears
to ignore or to understate the importance of the processes that
aggregate or condense power in centralised states." Foucault, with the dramatic image of
violence to the condemned that opens Discipline and Punish,also
drew disproportionate attention to the criminal law as the emblematic
legal force to be accounted for. Hunt and Wickham are instructive in the
matter of what gets lost in this framework. For them, "The other faces
of law which, in so far as one can safely quantify law, make up its
great bulk of provisions concern the detail of economic and kinship
relations and the distribution of social authority." Indeed, this propensity to equate law with legal institutions in
general and violent transgressions in particular is part of the
contemporary configuration of power which must be theorised in order to
understand power and law. The reception of Foucault reflects the
ideology of Legal Realism, which incorporates a picture of an
emasculated legal form in its own articulation of power. Go to top of page The public learns about and interacts with this site of justice. In
the segment aired June 21 Laura appears upset as she hears the docket
read by her assistant. He wonders if she is depressed because justice
has been corrupted by private interests and her authority undercut by a
disrespectful public. Her response, "I can deal with that," is one of
the key laugh lines in the show. It is the approach of her 40th year
that is causing her trouble and becomes the focus of the episode.
(Images courtesy of Artists Services & ABC)
Architects and the Private Sphere
Architects dominate in constructing the
institutional framework for courts. They may be subservient in the
details and the functions, but they dominate the way it is all put
together. This is to say, for the most part, they dominate what the
public takes in. Not too long ago in the academy it was fashionable to examine the
conventional distinction between a public sphere based on governmental
authority and a private sphere based on the market and personal
relations. It had come into question with feminism and the sense that
much that had been thought to be private, like sexual relations, were
actually social matters, public things. The distinction did not hold
up...that public and private were really intertwined. The distinction is part of a Nineteenth Century inheritance. It is
the theoretical basis for the distinction we feel exists between the
architecture of courts or parliament and the presence of a car dealer or
department store. This inherited distinction makes it difficult to see
the place of the courts today in a system of law, order and justice. I
propose, with Foucault, that the old order epitomised by the Melbourne
Supreme Court is no longer operating. Not only is the colonial power
that built that structure as well as the statues to Victoria no longer
in control, but the modern courts are no longer the preeminent sites of
the law. Go to top of
page There are a number of important senses bearing on this
essay in which the distinction no longer matters. One is the perspective
on commodification in which the form of law takes on the form of the
market place. In the same vein, Helen Garner in The First Stone, suggests
that "one reason for the popularity and addictive nature of talk shows,
specially the rehashes of trials, is that people in their hearts no
longer believe that courts provide justice." These televised bunfights are a grotesque parody of a fantasy I
repreatedly had when I covered the child-murderer's trial - a fantasy
that there might exist some other forum, outside the harsh rules of
evidence which excise context; some better, broader, freer, less
rule-bound gathering of the tribe; a forum in which everything might be
said, everybody listened to; where bursts of laughter and shouts of rage
might not be outlawed; where if people agreed to take turns everyone
might at last, at last be heard. Garner's insight as a writer takes off from her portrayal of a sexual
harassment case, where the resort to trial appears to her to indicate a
failure on the part of the other social institutions. And where the
unsatisfactory nature of the trial is indicated by the fact of social
consequences that are based not on the conclusions of the trial but of
the accusations and the social meaning they have in the institutional
context in which they are brought.
For some time, private has been juxtaposed against the public
authority that steps in with prosecution, conviction and punishment.
Maybe in a privatised system with the criminal not so much outside of
society but simply a failure in the marketplace, the justice system will
become a market mechanism that isolates the failures much as gated
suburbs increasingly isolate them in the housing arena. Go to top of page Some time ago the ex-patriate Robert Hughes gave a presentation in
Sydney on the ways urban architecture has changed and the failure to
preserve important sites in Australia. The history, of course, is Victorian and this was Victoria so that is
not to say it mattered not at all. Yet there seemed to be something
provocative going on and it bore some relation to the point made by
Hughes. Courts today are, in most places, overwhelmed by the facilities
of commerce including the great infrastructures (bridges, airports and
freeways) and the buildings that house the NGOs and the corporations.
Even the Magistrates Court in Melbourne, which is new and nice, is not
much grander or more imposing than the Board of Wheat Trade that has a
similar building down the street. In Sydney, of course it is the Opera
House and the Harbour Bridge that dominate the skyline.
Perhaps the old pictures that we should be comparing our present to
when we think of sites of law are the Wadi Wadi places suggested by Barbara Nicholson. Where the Wadi Wadi
dispensed the law under Grandmother Mountain, the Mt. Keira that stands
over the university, the present regime includes the University and the
corporations, the registrars and clerks, the insurance men and women,
the UPC, the Regos (the place where you register your car) as the new
sites of law. These are the sites of law that make the courts marginal.
The High Court Paradox My own work, beginning with The Cult of the Court in
1987, The United States Supreme Court though it appears to have been on
Capitol Hill since classical times, is only a sixty year old building
and the High Court of Australia, though it predates the Parliament, is
not yet twenty years old. These courts have been growing relative to the
other institutions of the national governments while courts in general
have been diminishing in stature relative to what surrounds
them. The Supreme Court building in Washington represents the old model
while law as process finds its expression more generically in the modern
skyscraper and the television monitor. Since construction of the Supreme
Court in the 1930s, this building has become a familiar referent for
law. With its allusion to a classical period, the Court has flourished
as a legal image in spite of modern architectural styles that arose at
the same time. Yet, the building is rarely entered. Instead, like other
legal forms the Court is known through the video screen. Television has
replaced buildings as the dominant place in the culture for law. The
architectural frame, and certainly the temple of justice, has become
little more than a trademark or logo placed in some corner of a TV
screen or a metaphor for television in the case of the High Court.
Attic Jurisprudence
I have called attention to the triangulated shape and discussed how
serendipitously the triadic function of courts described by Martin Shapiro is represented in this
shape. Though relatively simple in comparison to some of the architectural
styles that preceded and followed the western adaptation of Greek ideas,
there seemed always to be room for ornamentation in the classical style.
On the Supreme Court, the facade of the pediment arrays the great
lawgivers and behind the columns huge bronze doors depict stories in the
life of the law. Between column and pediment at the Supreme Court, the
words "Equal Justice Under the Law" are etched in stone. Today, the
Supreme Court bears a heavy burden of legal semiotics. Both because
local courts have not sought to achieve such symbolic grandeur and
because the Court itself has been employed as a symbol of the law, the
actual physical manifestation of the attic has been exchanged for a
virtual reality.
A period of virtual reality does not move from these constraints
entirely. Court TV employs a symbolic representation of the Supreme
Court as its logo as do many of the networks when they cover legal
stories. I have proposed that the minstitutionalised significant development in the
architecture of law or architectural jurisprudence is the role of
television in constructing spaces where the law resides. In the past,
the elevated bench of the judge was meant to instill awe, the box for
the jury was a place to gather a group so that they might perform a
duty, and a bar or rail sperated the public from the court. Today, the
lawyers’ news conference, the celebrity legal commentators, video
images of testimony (and video testimony), and the orchestration from
the anchor desk are the forms through which law is transmitted to most
of us. It is through these latter forms, not the halls and walls of
justice, that black and white Americans formed their divergent opinions
of the O.J. Simpson case. Given this shift, the fictionalised and
reported presentations of the halls of justice take on special
significance. Go to top of
page REFERENCES
1 Jarvis, R.M. & Joseph,
P.R (eds) 1998, Prime Time Law: Fictional Television as Legal
Narrative, Durham, N.C.: Carolina Academic Press. Go to top of page
Courtrooms have been
important to the representation of the legal process, along with the
precinct house, the prison cell, the judges' chamber, and the lawyer's
office. In one of America's most compelling legal dramas, Sidney Lumet's
1957 move 12 Angry Men (the source of the story was a television
play), the jury room is the focus of the action. In police dramas the
station house is often the center of the drama or, in the case of
NYPD Blue, the "interview" room. In series like LA Law and
Murder One,the lawyer's office or the firm's suite of offices
becomes the center of attention. While the show makes bargaining more
prominent than its predecessors do, the courtroom brings structure and
finality, and, although it is more expensive to produce than a
conversation, the limited, familiar space of a courtroom is relatively
easy to capture on stage.
Because LA Law is not primarily a courtroom
drama, the courtroom scenes need to be set against a number of other
notable qualities about the series. These are an emphasis on civil
rather than criminal law, the prominence of the boardroom at the
beginning of each show, and the centrality of the individual
lawyers’ offices - rather than the courtroom - as places where law
operates. Like police and detective shows, such as Hill Street
Blues or NYPD Blue, to which it is related, and unlike the
traditional lawyer shows such as Perry Mason and The
Advocates,this drama situates most legal work, and hence the law,
outside the courtroom. This recentering of the law has important effects
on the place of the courtroom in the drama and may also reflect its
place in contemporary society. While the courtroom has changed little in
appearance, its significance as a legal icon has diminished.
For many students of law in
society, the law has been an alien realm difficult to penetrate by the
average citizen. The authors of an introduction to the legal process,
Before the Law,12 now in its
sixth edition, take their title from the Czech novelist and lawyer Franz
Kafka. Their materials begin with excepts from The Trial, Kafka's
1937 novel.
As I began the project on the television show, the thing
that struck me about LA Law, and initially challenged the path I
had chosen, was the relative absence of the courtroom in each hour long
episode. This show, for those of you who were not devoted fans, focused
on a law firm in Los Angeles, called MacKenzie Brackman. Each episode
began with a meeting of the lawyers in the firm around a long table with
glass walls that allowed the activity of the staff at the firm to go on
in the background. The action then most often went to lawyers offices
and fancy Los Angeles restaurants where attorneys negotiated with
clients and deals were struck. It did not spend much time in the
courtroom.15
Michel Foucault, the influential
French intellectual who was so influential among university based
scholars in the 1980s taught us that physical spectacle as a key to
legal power has been transcended or at least amended by the
Enlightenment. We have gone from drawing and quartering or flogging on
the public square to more subtle forms of ordering which he calls
"discipline". The Foucauldian message has a bearing for our studies of
court architecture. For all the importance we deservedly place on
courts, when taken in perspective, the courts are simply not as
important to law as they once were.
Television plays
into this arrangement. Recently, Sigrid Thornton
heroine of a generation of Australian classics, has turned up on
television as Laura Gibson, a drop out from corporate lawyering who
presides over the Magistrates Court in the resort town of Pearl Bay in
the ABC/Artist Services co-production of Sea Change.25 This show has taken off as one of ABC's highest rated
series ever. In a cover story in the entertainment section of The
Sydney Morning Herald, for May 4, 1998, Jane Freeman features
Thornton in a story on strong women in television. She says "Laura is
obsessive, neurotic, self-absorbed and outspoken. In short, she's one
fierce woman."
26
In Behind the Post-Modern
Facade,27 Magali
Larson depicts the rich social context in which architecture is made.
Any piece of architecture, she says, draws various aspects of the
community, the funders, the builders, and the neighbors into its web.
Architecture in her sociological presentation, is public art and as such
it is a social phenomenon. Legal architecture has at least as many
masters. It has the social interests and capacities of those who
identify a need, those who propose and fund buildings. It has the
aesthetic interests behind it of architecture and of engineering which
give form to the interests and capacities we imagine to be primary
sources for the built world. And, legal architecture has the special
needs of the legal community, particularly the judges, for whom the
security of the building is as important a consideration in many cases
as aesthetics. Thus buildings are linked to jurisprudence in a
multifaceted way that reflects the link between law and society
generally.
The
observation that courts have become marginal to the lawmaking process
tends to run counter to the perception fostered by those who follow the
development of the highest courts in Australia, Canada and America.
Courts like the High Court of Australia and the Supreme Court of the
United States seem to be getting more and more important, and certainly
they are more and more visible architecturally than they used to be. In
the United States there are places, like the extra marital relations of
a sitting President, where courts would not have ventured in times past.
In Australia, the head of government, though not perceived as likely to
chase interning teenagers around the bedroom, has certainly had his
share of High Court related challenges in the six months I have been in
Australia.35
The presence of High Courts cuts
against the marginalisation of the courts in everyday justice. One of
the enduring shapes of court architecture has been the attic portico,
the architectural feature where columns hold up a triangulated pediment
that outlines the front of a traditional roof. This form has been
present in American court architecture since the Greek revival of the
1820s. The shape also appears in vernacular architecture, but without
the columns. It outlines the ordinary attic. Paradoxically, although the
portico has faded from court architecture in response to the rise of
modernism and the international style with its sleek functional lines,
the classical form is carried through in contemporary jurisprudential
images as the front of the Supreme Court building in Washington.
Although it appears on occasion in post-modernism, the Greek portico,
like the Chippendale curleques atop the AT&T building in Manhattan,
seems more superficial than integral to contemporary court architecture.
return to text
2 Produced by Stephen
Bochco (Hill Street Blues, NYPD Blue) and Terry Louise Fisher,
with music by Michael Post.
return to text
3 Applications to law
school went up 25% when the show was being aired and dropped
proportionately when it went off.
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text
4 "Americans have moved,
in this century, from the framing of law by means of classical images of
justice such as the Greek Temple, to an emphasis on process symbolised
by electronic circuitry and video equipment." Brigham, J. 1994,
'Exploring the Attic: Courts and Communities in Material Life' in
Mendelsohn, O. & Maher, L. (eds), Law in Context - Special Issue on
Courts, Tribunals and New Approaches to Justice, Bundoora: La Trobe
University Press, 131-155.
return to text
5 Bohannon, P. 1971,
'Double Institutionalisation', in Wolff, R.P. (ed), The Rule of
Law, New York: Simon and Shuster.
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6 Young, A. 1996,
Imagining Crime, London: Sage.
return to text
7 Brigham, J. &
Harrington, C.B. 1989, 'Realism and Its Consequences', International
Journal of the Sociology of Law, 17(1): 41-62.
return to text
8 The ABC produced 13
episodes of The Practice and aired six in the spring of 1997 in
the NYPD Blue time slot. The show stars Dylan McDermott as Bobby
Donnell, the head of a small Boston law firm who fights eviction from
his low rent office at the same time that he fights for his clients. The
show features the traditional struggle of the underdog against the
forces of power and influence, and relies on the storybook rewards of
lives saved and trusts kept over the financial rewards more central to
McKenzie, Brackman, Chaney, & Kuzak.
return to
text
9Shapiro, M. 'Political
Theory to Public Policy'.
return to textIncomplete
Reference. Please contact author for full details.
10 The New York
Times, May 25 1997.
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11 Bordwell, D.,
Staiger, J. & Thompson, K. 1985, The Classical Hollywood Cinema:
Film Style and Mode of Production to 1960. New York: Columbia
University Press.
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12 Bonsignore, J.,
Katsch, E., d'Errico, P., Pipkin, R.M., Arons, S. & Rifkin, J. (eds)
1992, Before the Law, Boston: Houghton-Mifflin.
return to text
13 Fiske, J. 1987,
Television Culture, New York: Routledge, 1987, p. 21.
return to text
14 Fiske 1987, pp.
38-39.
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15 As noted above,
LA Law has not totally shifted cultural attention from the
courtroom as the center of the legal enterprise. Even, where, as in
LA Law it is not the actual center of the action in most
episodes, the courtroom remains a place of distinctly legal drama and of
climax.
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16 See, for example,
discussion of Robert Hughes' comments in one of the following sections
of this article, entitled 'Architects and the Private Sphere'.
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17 "...in modernity
'small power', in particular power located in sites away from the
central locations of 'big power' (for example, the state or capital),
has become a defining characteristic of power." Foucault, M. 1977,
Discipline & Punish, London: Penguin Books, p.16.
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18The Uniform Product
Code not only allows tracking of products going in and out of stores but
it provides the basis for supervision and to some degree surveillance of
clerks and customers. In the American Presidential election of 1992,
candidate George Bush's lack of familiarity with the mechanism came to
signify his not being in touch with social life and contributed to his
defeat.
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19"The disciplines are
to be found 'on the underside of the law'. The result is that all the
institutions of incarceration, prisons, asylums and, by extension,
factories and schools, operate in such a way as to 'naturalise' the
legal power to punish at the same time as they 'legalise' the technical
power to discipline." Hunt, A. & Wickham, G. 1994, Foucault and Law:
Towards a Sociology of Law as Governance, London: Pluto Press.
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20 Hunt & Wickham 1994,
p.57.
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21 Hunt & Wickham 1994,
p.18.
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22 "Since law does not
constitute his object of inquiry, he has no special interest in
exploring one rather obvious, but nonetheless attractive, hypothesis,
namely, that associated with the rise of the disciplines there has
occurred a change in the form of law." Hunt & Wickham 1994, p.51.
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23Hunt & Wickham 1994,
p.60.
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24 "Foucault's
derivation of law from monarchical power eliminates a more adequate
history of law as emanating from dispersed sites of royal power, popular
self-regulation, customary rights, competing specialised jurisdictions
(ecclesiastical, guild, commercial, etc.), local and regional
autonomies, and other forms of law." Hunt & Wickham 1994, p.60.
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25 Written by Deborah
Cox. Also starring David Wenham, John Howard, Kerry Armstrong and Jill
Forster.
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26Freeman, J. 1998,
'Women Take the Lead', in The Sydney Morning Herald - The Guide,
p. 4.
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27 Larson, M.S. 1993,
Behind the Postmodern Facade, Berkeley: University of California
Press.
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28 Personal
communications with Rebecca Hearty, architect of Wyong Court House;
Graham Brawn, Architecture Faculty, Melbourne University, who is
involved in planning for court complex in Perth; and Tim Shannon,
involved with the Commonwealth Complex in Melbourne.
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29 An interesting case
study might involve examining the relationship between architectural
forms and surveillancePrivatised
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30 Mohr, R. 1998,
'Commodification of Justice and the 'Re-Privatisation' of Private
Property', Paper presented at Commodification: Theories, Practices,
Histories and Representations, Conference held at the University of
Wollongong, 19-20 February 1998.
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text
31 Aired June 14
1998.
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32 Aired June 21
1998.
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33 Garner, H. 1995,
The First Stone, Sydney: Picador, pp.207-208.
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34 Presentation given
at Sydney Town Hall, April 28 1998, as part of The National Trust's
Heritage Week.
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35 Brigham, J. 1987,
The Cult of the Court, Philadelphia: Temple University Press;
Rosenberg, G. 1991, The Hollow Hope: Can Courts Bring about Social
Change?, Chicago: University of Chicago Press; Solomon, D. 1992,
The Political Impact of the High Court, North Sydney: Allen &
Unwin.
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36 Brigham 1987.
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37 'Inside Story: The
Highest Court', Channel 2, May 26 1998. The Age columnist
Simon Hughes writes offers a history in judicial activism when he begins
his review with the following observation: "The Wik decision was not the
first time that the High Court of Australia has found itself in
oppposition to the political status quo.
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text
38 Brigham, J. 1994,
'Signs in the Attic: Courts in Material Life' in Rauch, I. & Carr, G.F.
(eds) Semiotics Around the World: Synthesis in Diversity -
Proceedings of the Fifth Congress of the International Association for
Semiotic Studies, Berkeley 1994, Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
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