Vol. 10 No. 10 (October 2000) pp. 538-540.

WHEN LAW GOES POP: THE VANISHING LINE BETWEEN LAW AND POPULAR CULTURE by Richard K. Sherwin. Chicago: University of Chicago, 2000. 325 pp. Cloth $27.00. ISBN 0-226-75291-7.

Reviewed by William Haltom, Department of Politics and Government, University of Puget Sound. Email: haltom@ups.edu.

"In this concluding chapter," Professor Richard K. Sherwin writes, "I aim to provide a general overview for the concrete studies that make up the bulk of this book. My working hypothesis throughout has been that law cannot be adequately understood without a careful examination of specific linguistic, cognitive, and cultural practices. BY MAKING THAT HYPOTHESIS EXPLICIT HERE I hope to make plain that in undertaking a highly contextualized approach to law I have been doing theory all along: postmodern theory, of the affirmative kind" (p. 235; italics added).

Many readers would have preferred Professor Sherwin to have called a game other than "no peek," however I suppose that "dealer's choice" is or should be the rule for books. If his preference is to reveal such a prosaic observation as a working hypothesis at the end of his exposition, I suppose Professor Sherwin may choose to do so.

Having read both the concrete studies and the attempted theory from the beginning of the book until its end, I found myself much more satisfied with the concrete than with the theoretical. Professor Sherwin offers insightful, intriguing analyses of movies and other cultural products. His examinations of legal discourse and popular culture will inform, enlighten, and even entertain. He also offers affirmative postmodern theory to replace sinister, cynical, negative trends in postmodern theory. The theoretical contribution is too skimpy to justify a place in my library. The analytical parts, however, warrant interlibrary loan.

As a result of my admiration for the excellence of some parts of this book and my agnosticism about the existence of any whole, I believe that this monograph may best be enjoyed as one might an anthology -- readers should pick and choose among chapters and sections. I recommend Sherwin's analysis of Errol Morris's "The Thin Blue Line." I shall never watch or show that classic without thinking about Professor Sherwin's gloss thereon. I disagree with his comparison of the older and younger versions of "Cape Fear" - indeed, I suspected that every characterization of one film might just as easily be asserted about the other -- but it held my interest and impelled me to watch both versions again. That Sherwin appears to believe that films of David Lynch and Quentin Tarantino betoken anything about theories or institutions of law and law enforcement seemed more than a bit of a stretch, much as I might wish it were otherwise. However, it does increase the stakes of his analyses.

I recommend highly Sherwin's comparison of the "jigsaw puzzle" closing

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of Marcia Clark and Christopher Darden in the first Simpson trial to the heroic saga narratives favored by Johnnie Cochran and Gerry Spence. Sherwin is especially good at exposing Mr. Spence's skill. Mr. Spence appears to be the shrewd country lawyer whom he plays on television. I also recommend Sherwin's account of myth making in famous cases of the 19th and 20th centuries. However, his consideration of landmarks of sensationalism calls into question just when the law began to go "pop."

I recommend that readers skip the numerous lists of questions with which Sherwin mars his manuscript. I could never be certain where the questions were headed and where I was supposed to the find the answers, if any. Readers will be under whelmed as well by Sherwin's augury from aberrations, including the aforementioned Simpson trial. In these matters, Sherwin seems to succumb to pop law and to see the world in a sound bite of "Rivera Live."

Most of all, I urge readers to overlook every attempt to generalize about law and legal institutions from movies. As I have said, his analyses of movies are intriguing. However, getting from the movies analyzed to legal institutions is no minor trick. When Sherwin would generalize to the legal culture from this or that trend that he claims to see in this or that movie, the reader should indulge his impulse to attend to the movie critique and to ignore the alleged social criticism that, it appears, the author believes his cinematic analyses justify. Sherwin's methodological justification for this twist on cinematic verity is quite facile. "My working assumption is that film, like notorious cases, provides a reasonably reliable indicator of shared, conflicted, and newly emerging beliefs, values, and expectations" (p. 171). With working assumptions such as that, what hypothesis wouldn't work out?

Selection biases do not trouble mass media and other purveyors of fiction, including movie critics and practitioners of grand theory. Readers who routinely attempt to differentiate between fiction and fact, however, will want to be able to trust selections. When Sherwin analyzes popular Hollywood features, his selection of films might be somewhat trustworthy as a guide to some trend or trends in society. I do not pretend to know how one would establish the validity or reliability of such indicators or the verisimilitude of inferences therefrom, but some readers will let that go. I doubt that any reader will be so forgiving of generalizations to the legal culture from the cinema of Philip Haas or Krzysztof Kieslowski. Rich and suggestive as such art house films are, neither Disney's Hercules nor Ronald Dworkin's might derive from such celluloid any propositions about the world that the reader need take seriously absent an abundance of evidence outside the movie house. I found no such evidence adduced.

Thus, I must also recommend that readers overlook the apparent thesis of the book. Sherwin's differentiation of postmodern sheep from postmodern goats failed to persuade me either that I had much to fear from the radical delegitimation conjured by postmodern skeptics (the aforementioned goats in this tragedy) or that tragic constructivism (the aforementioned postmodern ovines) offered me a brighter future than I might otherwise expect. The author's rendition of postmodernism seemed to me a bogey. The specter of skeptical postmodernism may haunt some in the Western world, but Sherwin's manifesto will

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strike most readers as disjointed and overwrought.