Law Through Popular Culture: Sara Benesh's new political science class examines courts through film and TV

“My Cousin Vinny” stars Joe Pesci as an inexperienced New York City lawyer trying to defend his cousin in an Alabama court room against a capital murder charge. Legal experts agree the movie’s rendition of courtroom proceedings is extremely accurate, and the American Bar Association ranks it No. 3 on its list of Top 25 Greatest Legal Movies.

Naturally, Sara Benesh included it on her syllabus.

Benesh, an associate professor of political science at UWM, just wrapped up her brand-new “Law Through Popular Culture” class last semester. Drawing on a range of media from “Perry Mason” to “Marshall,” the course asked students to analyze how the courtroom has been portrayed in American movies and television shows over the years.

At first blush, it might sound as though students were signing up to watch movies for homework – and they did, since many of the films and shows were too long to view during class.

But the question of how law is portrayed in popular media is an important one, says Benesh.

“My research area is legitimacy of courts. I’m fascinated by that,” she said. “But when you study legitimacy, one of the interesting things about it is that we don’t really know where it comes from. How does it happen that people have these certain perceptions about courts?

“My hypothesis is that it’s the media. It’s films and novels and stories,” Benesh added.

Sara Benesh’s new class examines the impact of popular media on the public’s perception of the court system. Photo by Sarah Vickery.

America has long been fascinated by the judicial system, and it’s evident in the way the focus of legal movies shifts over the decades. Some years, she says, the public is hungry for tough but fair prosecutors as their movie heroes; in others, they want to root for the underdog on the defense.

The class focused on media portrayals of everything from local county courts all the way to the Supreme Court. Benesh curated her playlist from a textbook written by Stanford professor Michael Asimow, and added her own selections if she saw a gap in Asimow’s coverage. Some of the works were classics, including “12 Angry Men” and “Kramer v. Kramer,” while others tended to the esoteric – Benesh admitted she’d never heard of the 1930s movie “Counsellor at Law” prior to the course, and she had a devil of a time tracking down a made-for-TV Andy Garcia movie called “Swing Vote.”

“The students hadn’t seen hardly any of these, which I thought was interesting,” Benesh said. “I got completely addicted to ‘Suits.’ We watched the first five episodes for class, and now I’ve seen the whole series.”

Alongside their visual homework, Benesh also had her students reading law review articles and papers on public policy, criminal justice, and journalism. She hoped to not only examine law in pop culture, but also introduce her students to different research methods and ways of thinking across the social science disciplines.

For a final project, she asked her class to create a research design – a method to answer a question related to the portrayal of law in pop culture. Many students proposed projects focused on the “CSI effect,” where some prosecutors claim that juries have been influenced by forensic shows that give an unrealistic idea about the capabilities of crime labs.

In fact, a good portion of the class was devoted to discussing what the movies and TV shows got wrong.

“Your eyes are really opened to the difference between what is depicted on television and what is reality,” student Selena Bravo noted. A political science major, she completed the course last semester and is interested in a career in law. She points out that everything from what the judges wear to the architecture of the courtroom might differ in real life from how they’re portrayed in movies.

For political science major Hannah Frontier, the class gave her a new understanding about current politics.

“My favorite movie was ‘Confirmation.’ The film tells the story of Anita Hill and her allegations (of sexual assault) against Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas,” Frontier said. “We watched the film around the same time that the Kavanaugh hearings were taking place. ... Watching the Kavanaugh hearings after watching ‘Confirmation’ almost gave me deja-vu, and gave me a lot of insight into the case and what may be taking place in the background of it all.”

Students will have to wait to take the course again; the earliest it could be offered is the spring semester of 2020. Even so, Benesh already has ideas about how to improve the experience, including sitting in on actual courtroom proceedings for a day.

Until then, court – and class – is adjourned.

By Sarah Vickery, College of Letters & Science