Just Looking: Justice as Seen in Hollywood Courtroom Films

Abstract

This article deals with three elements of the adversarial judicial process, conventionally viewed as expressing justice, and examines their meaning in the Hollywood courtroom film genre. These include the space (architecture and design) of the courtroom, the element of the lawyer’s duty, and the narrative of the legal process. We suggest that characteristics of the actual adversarial judicial process, accepted as showing how justice is achieved, are actually presented in a critical manner in courtroom films, and are often used to indicate the difficulty in attaining justice through the judicial process. This finding is surprising, given the law’s emphasis on the characteristics of justice as part of its social legitimization, and in light of the central tendency of genre films to support existing social institutions, the institution of the law among them.