Journal of Legal Education (Association of American Law Schools)

Asimow, Michael

Sassoubre, Ticien Marie

2 
Introduction to the Symposium on 
Visual Images and Popular Culture  
in Legal Education
Michael Asimow and Ticien Marie Sassoubre
Legal education historically was based entirely on written text. Traditional 
casebooks were just that—edited copies of appellate cases with textual notes. 
Pictures in casebooks were so rare that they deserved protection under the 
Endangered Species Act. In class, law teachers wrote words on the board. In 
recent years, many have used technologies such as PowerPoint to facilitate 
teaching, but the material projected on the screen was often more text. In 
our social world, however, the authority of the visual rivals that of written 
text. Today, all of us swim in a sea of images on television, on billboards, on 
computer screens, everywhere. Our students think visually. Legal education 
must keep pace. 
This symposium explores the possible uses of visual imagery in legal 
education. The fifteen relatively brief articles that follow take many different 
tacks, but all of them are intended to suggest new ideas and new methodologies 
to law teachers. We have divided them roughly into three categories. First, the 
use of visual materials (including scenes from television and film) in teaching 
traditional law courses. Second, teaching law students to interpret and to 
create visual materials and cope with new communication platforms. Third, 
teaching courses in law and popular culture.
Of course, these three categories overlap in many ways. A law and popular 
culture class could be devoted entirely to using television and film to teach 
jurisprudence or professional responsibility (thus mixing the first and third 
categories). Or a course in making documentaries could be focused on 
documentaries for use in death penalty cases (thus mixing the first and second 
categories). Or a trial practice class could concentrate mostly on making visual 
aids such as simulations for use in personal injury cases (again mixing the first 
and second categories). But while the categories may be fluid, we hope that 
organizing the symposium this way helps readers identify the visual tools most 
relevant to their teaching goals.
Journal of Legal Education, Volume 68, Number 1 (Autumn 2018)
Michael Asimow is Visiting Professor of Law, Stanford Law School, and Professor of Law 
Emeritus, UCLA School of Law. Email: asimow@law.stanford.edu. Ticien Marie Sassoubre is 
Lecturer, Stanford Law School. Email: tsassoubre@law.stanford.edu.
3
A. THE USE OF VISUAL MATERIALS  
(INCLUDING POPULAR CULTURE)  
IN LAW SCHOOL COURSES
The first six articles in the symposium concern the use of visual imagery in 
teaching traditional law school classes. Elizabeth G. Porter’s article Imagining 
Law: Visual Thinking Across the Law School Curriculum is a good place to start. As 
law practice becomes increasingly multimodal, Porter argues, the use of visual 
materials must be integrated into legal education. And she suggests some 
“low-friction, hands-on ways to incorporate a visual element into whatever 
course you teach.” Law teachers can show students legal documents, such as 
pleadings, that incorporate visual imagery. But the persuasive effect of layout, 
font, and other visual aspects of traditional words-only documents can be 
analyzed as well. Porter also suggests inviting students to practice spotting 
and analyzing the legal issues through images that capture legal concepts. 
The other articles in this part of the symposium focus on the use of visuals 
in teaching particular areas of law. For example, George Fisher’s article Evidence 
by the Video Method describes his use of short but vivid video clips drawn from 
popular culture to generate hypotheticals in a class on evidence. Fisher then 
assigns student prosecutors and defenders to argue about the admissibility of 
the evidence. One clip Fisher uses involves chilling testimony from a former 
girlfriend of the defendant about his threats to torture her if she was unfaithful. 
Is this unlawful character evidence? Not in California, it isn’t. Or how about 
a scene from Fatal Attraction in which a husband confesses an affair to his wife? 
Would it be inadmissible hearsay when offered in a subsequent murder trial? 
It all depends on who is on trial for what. While Fisher argues that some 
of the horrifying human acts we encounter in evidence must be addressed 
without the gloss of fiction, using scenes from popular culture has at least 
two advantages. One is that it allows students to role-play as advocates more 
freely—no real-life occurrence is at stake. The other is that popular culture 
imagines and dramatizes events that no camera could capture in everyday life. 
These scenes bring to life the emotional and social stakes of questions that 
might feel opaque or sterile as written text. 
The article by Felice Batlan and Joshua Bass, Beyond Greed Is Good: Pop Culture 
in the Business Law Classroom, brings movies and television into the business 
organizations classroom. Students coming to business organizations might 
understandably expect a heavily quantitative and abstract course. Using 
popular culture to contextualize the concepts of the course helps make those 
concepts more accessible and engaging. It also provides opportunities to 
discuss the larger social frame in which those concepts arise. The documentary 
The Trouble with Antibiotics and an episode from Billions cast light on whether the 
purpose of a corporation is exclusively to make a profit regardless of social 
harm. An episode from Silicon Valley provides levity but also enriches the 
discussion of limited liability and the duty of care. And, of course, Gordon 
Gecko’s notorious pronouncement that “greed is good” from Wall Street 
enlivens the discussion of leveraged buyouts, junk bonds, and insider trading.
4 Journal of Legal Education
In Expanding the Pie or Slicing the Bug? ADR Education via Animated Short, Jennifer 
L. Schulz discusses the uses of a short cartoon in teaching alternative dispute 
resolution. Dinner for Two is an animated short starring two lizards fighting 
over the same bug and a frog that ultimately helps them find a compromise 
solution. In just seven minutes, the film demonstrates many foundational 
ADR concepts, including the risks of entrenchment in one’s position, the 
use of mediation to avoid a zero-sum resolution (such as litigation), and the 
importance of allowing combatants to save face. The frog’s behavior also 
raises important questions about mediator ethics.
Philip N. Meyer and Catlin A. Davis argue that successful criminal law 
advocacy depends on the lawyer’s ability to tell a persuasive story. Their 
article, Law Students Go to the Movies II: Using Clips from Classic Hollywood Movies to 
Teach Criminal Law and Legal Storytelling to First-Year Law Students, describes how 
Meyer uses a short clip from the film A Place in the Sun to teach the elements 
of mens rea in homicide law. The clip shows the difficulty in classifying the 
mental state of George Eastman when his ill-fated canoe trip results in the 
drowning death of his pregnant girlfriend. Is it first-degree murder? Second-
degree? Manslaughter (voluntary or involuntary)? Or none of the above? 
Meyer assigns students to serve as prosecutors who must weave the available 
and ambiguous facts into a compelling narrative. 
In A Dose of Color, A Dose of Reality: Contextualizing Intentional Tort Actions with 
Black Documentaries, Regina Austin describes the way documentary films can 
provide important cultural context in the assessment of tort claims. This 
kind of contextual analysis, Austin argues, exposes the social conditions 
that drive legal disputes. As an example, she discusses the case of Klayman v. 
Obama, in which Larry Klayman claimed that Black Lives Matter, among other 
defendants, was liable for various intentional torts (including intentional 
infliction of emotional distress) by fomenting hostility toward the police 
in black communities. The court dismissed the case but declined to hold 
Klayman liable for sanctions. Austin juxtaposes the claims in Klayman to two 
documentary films. One, I Am Not Your Negro, locates Klayman’s claims in a 
historical tradition of white resistance to black self-assertion. The second, 
Whose Streets?, focuses on the protests in Ferguson triggered by the police killing 
of Michael Brown. In its exposure of discriminatory practices by the Ferguson 
city government, exposure of police violence, and humanization of protestors, 
Whose Streets? provides a compelling counter-narrative to Klayman’s complaint. 
B. TEACHING LAW STUDENTS TO INTERPRET  
AND TO CREATE VISUAL MATERIALS
Six of the articles in the symposium offer perspectives on teaching law 
school courses in visual literacy. The courses described variously teach students 
how to interpret visual images and employ visual forms of storytelling, how to 
deploy visual rhetoric and create visual images for use in legal contexts, and 
how to both spot and avoid the mistakes of naïve realism. 
5
Richard K. Sherwin describes his visual persuasion course in Visual Literacy 
for the Legal Profession. Sherwin observes that visual materials convey more 
information more vividly, and with much greater emotional impact, than 
words alone. As a result, people are less likely to challenge visual evidence 
than they are text- or witness-based evidence. People also tend to think their 
own interpretation of visual images is objective, a tendency described as “naïve 
realism.” In his interdisciplinary course, Sherwin teaches students to both 
interpret and create persuasive visual materials, including visual narratives. 
Students view a wide range of images, including graphics, simulations, and 
surveillance videos. They also learn by doing through participatory exercises 
and by making and editing their own videos. 
Michael D. Murray also teaches visual persuasion. His article, The Sharpest 
Tool in the Toolbox: Visual Legal Rhetoric, stresses that visual imagery is not only 
faster than words, it is better than words at persuading an audience of the 
truth of the speaker’s communication. The article offers practical guidance 
for determining when to use or not use visual tools in writing pleadings or 
briefs or presenting evidence. When visuals are used, the lawyer must consider 
issues of mise-en-scène (that is, what is in the picture), the degree to which it 
is appropriate to manipulate the contents of visual images, and whether to 
use color. The stakes of these considerations, he reminds us, are not merely 
strategic, but ethical. Murray also encourages the use of focus groups to 
evaluate visual evidence that the lawyer is considering, as the emotional impact 
of a particular visual may vary greatly among different viewers.
Naomi Jewel Mezey’s article, Teaching Images, focuses on the now-infamous 
car-chase video in Scott v. Harris. Mezey employs the video in teaching summary 
judgment, but her article models teaching students how to engage critically 
with video evidence more generally. In Harris, the Supreme Court majority 
treated dashboard camera video as conclusive. But as Mezey insists, an 
image never speaks for itself. Mezey describes the class exercise through 
which students come to understand the ways in which the Court’s analysis 
of the video mistakes subjective interpretation for perceived fact. Through 
the exercise, students learn that when a photo or video is used as evidence, 
it must be scrutinized as carefully as the testimony of an eyewitness. Among 
the questions that must be asked of an image are from what point of view it 
was made, how it is edited or limited by the position of the camera, what is 
its relative clarity, and whether it is equipped to answer a given legal question 
at all. Determining the reasonableness of an act from a video is much more 
difficult when it is acknowledged that different viewers will interpret the same 
video differently.
Ticien Marie Sassoubre’s article, Visual Persuasion for Lawyers, wrestles with the 
meaning of the term “visual literacy.” Visual literacy is not like textual literacy; 
we don’t read pictures the way we read text. Visual images do not convey 
information the same way that text does. Nor is there a single authoritative 
rubric for interpreting images that law can borrow from another discipline. 
Sassoubre proposes that visual literacy for lawyers might require developing 
Visual Images and Popular Culture in Legal Education
6 Journal of Legal Education
competence in a wide range of visual representational practices as they make 
their way into legal discourse. Her course in visual literacy emphasizes inquiry 
into how and why various types of images are produced, the legal and social 
histories of different visual representational practices, and competing theories 
of interpretation. Her course also explores the way the visual images that 
pervade our culture inform legal analysis and construct social facts. 
William S. Bailey’s article, Lessons from Pop Culture: What School of Rock 
Can Teach the School of Law, discusses the uses of popular culture and visual 
evidence in teaching trial advocacy. In School of Rock, Dewey Finn transforms 
a boring music class by involving the students in rock ’n’ roll. Channeling 
Dewey, Bailey contends that most lawyers fail dismally in communication 
and persuasion skills. In his teaching, Bailey uses pop culture to demonstrate 
effective storytelling and provides intensive trai
ning in the use of visual tools such as computer animation.
In their article Narrative Topoi in the Digital Age, Zahr K. Said and Jessica 
Silbey argue that law teaching must take into account new and pervasive 
forums for storytelling and communication (which they define as narrative 
topoi). They offer three examples of potent and legally relevant new genres: 
podcasts and TV serials, connected Twitter feeds, and fake news. Televised 
serials and podcasts, like the hit Serial, have changed the way audiences relate 
to narratives by inducing binge-watching and binge-listening. Many are also 
law- and crime-themed. Said and Silbey explore the way that such serialized 
storytelling informs audiences’ expectations: Serial was a real breakthrough 
because it did not resolve neatly; each podcast heaped on new information, 
but in the end the listeners who sought a clear answer about the guilt of Adnan 
Syed were left in doubt. Connected Twitter feeds, like Sarah Jeong’s rapid-
fire accounts of the Google v. Oracle trial, also constitute a new narrative form. 
And the phenomena of clickbait and fake news are challenging traditional 
conventions of authority and truth. Law students will need to understand 
these new storytelling modes.
C. CLASSES IN LAW AND POPULAR CULTURE
Finally, the symposium concludes with three articles about courses in law 
and popular culture. Inspired by the better-established law-and-literature 
curriculum, those who offer seminars on law and popular culture take a variety 
of different paths in teaching this vast body of material. 
Michael Asimow’s article, The Mirror and the Lamp: The Law and Popular Culture 
Seminar, argues for the value of such seminars. The media of popular culture 
serve as a valuable though distorted “mirror” of the reality about law and public 
opinion that they pretend to represent. And they serve as a powerful “lamp” 
by which people are taught (and misled) about the legal system. Asimow 
chooses different films and television shows to illuminate particular areas of 
law and law practice, such as the classic 1933 film Counsellor at Law (directed by 
William Wyler). This film shows students what a lawyer’s life is really like. It 
7
isn’t dramatic showdowns in the courtroom. Instead, it’s running a busy office, 
the waiting room packed with clients, the phone ringing off the hook. Lawyers 
have to deal with personnel issues—partners, paralegals, associates, and staff 
members who operate the switchboard. They have to make money. And 
they must maintain a personal life as well. The film is packed with material 
about race, class, and ethnicity. Ethical dilemmas pop up constantly, and the 
protagonist, successful lawyer George Simon (John Barrymore), isn’t always 
on the right side. 
In her article It All Started with Columbo, Christine A. Corcos discusses the value 
of the law-and-pop-culture seminar as well as some of the practical problems 
the instructor encounters in teaching it.1 She regards the class as an excellent 
way to re-examine through a cultural lens the legal doctrine and procedure 
that students have already learned in other classes. Of the practical problems, 
the first is the need to convince the curriculum committee of the value of the 
course. Second, the teacher must settle on a method of structuring the course. 
Third, the teacher must acquire and maintain some facility with disciplines 
other than law. Fourth, the instructor must choose a teaching book, decide 
whether to assign homework, decide what sort of paper topics are acceptable, 
and establish grading criteria. Fifth, the instructor should consider inviting 
guests to the class. Corcos invites a local filmmaker, whom the students 
always enjoy. Finally, the instructor must strike a balance between the need 
for students to interpret the films on their own and the need for the better-
informed instructor to impose his or her own views. 
In Dr. Strangelaw, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Pop Culture, Donald 
Papy recounts how he came to be teaching law and pop culture. It started 
with a frustrating experience as a TV commentator on the Clarence Thomas 
confirmation hearing. Then came the O.J. Simpson case and a dawning 
realization that the mass media was having an enormous effect on the legal 
system. Then came reading some of the fascinating literature of the new law-
and-pop-culture movement. All this led him to realize that people learn most 
of what they know about law and lawyers from pop culture, and that mass 
media affects the legal system in many profound ways. Papy insists that law 
teachers must be aware of the interface between law and popular culture. 
D. CONCLUSION
We live in a multimodal world. That reality is already transforming legal 
practice, and it is time for legal education to join the twenty-first century. As 
we hope this symposium makes clear, the opportunities for enriching and 
enlivening law teaching through visual images and popular culture are well 
worth exploring. We hope that all law teachers will consider carefully how 
they can make use of these powerful teaching tools. Meanwhile, enjoy the 
fifteen articles that follow! 
1. We call your attention to the forthcoming book Teaching Law with Popular Culture, edited 
by Christine Corcos, to be published by Carolina Academic Press in 2019. This book surveys 
the use of popular-culture materials in teaching a broad range of law school classes. 
Visual Images and Popular Culture in Legal Education


English

Introduction to the Symposium on Visual Images  and Popular Culture in Legal Education

Kuehn, Robert R.

Moss, David R.

A Study of the Relationship Between Law School Coursework and Bar Exam Outcomes

Woo, Margaret Y.K.

764 
Book Review 
Katharine Young, ed., The Future of Economic and Social Rights, Cambridge, 
England: Cambridge University Press, 2019, pp. 524, $175 (hardcover).
Reviewed by Margaret Y.K. Woo
In March 2019, reeling from news of two fatal crashes, countries around 
the world grounded the Boeing 737 MAX. The United States, however, was a 
notable holdout. In refusing to act, the United States maintained that relevant 
authorities “had not provided data” that would warrant action.1 In other 
words, until there is evidence of error, there is no reason to ground Boeing 
planes. Other countries, meanwhile, were of the contrary view that until there 
is evidence of no error, the prudent course is to ground Boeing planes. Do 
these differing responses reflect divergent views of safety? Is the U.S. response 
more attributable to the dominance of free market ideology in our country? 
Equally likely, we may be seeing a fundamental difference in views toward 
governmental obligation. The United States may be the outlier, embracing 
the traditional view that individual rights, including constitutional rights, are 
“negative rights” to be held against governmental infringement rather than 
positive rights to be enforced by affirmative government action. It is a view 
for a limited and restricted government and a preference for political and civil 
rights, rather than social and economic rights.
Yet widening income gaps are growing globally along with the call for 
greater economic and social rights. And so, what is the future for economic 
and social rights and their ability to secure fundamental resources necessary 
for development and well-being? Challenges to social and economic rights 
have been prolific. One argument is that “positive” rights place costs on 
the state that “negative rights” do not. Critics point out that while negative 
rights require withdrawal of government action, positive rights require 
costly government enforcement. Furthermore, judicial enforcement of social 
and economic rights is said to be antidemocratic in subverting majoritarian 
policy decision by judicial fiat. A third challenge points out that assertions 
of social and economic rights in lieu of more radical distributive equality 
1. US refuses to ground Boeing 737 Max crash aircraft, BBC News, Mar. 13, 2019 https://www.
bbc.com/news/business-47548083.
Journal of Legal Education, Volume 68, Number 3 (Spring 2019)
Margaret Y.K. Woo is Professor of Law and Associate Dean for Research and Interdisciplinary 
Education at Northeastern University School of Law. She is also a co-faculty director for the law 
school’s Program on Human Rights and the Global Economy.
765
tend to benefit“middle-income” groups rather than the poorest and most 
marginalized, and ignore underlying structural conditions. So, how could we 
meet these critiques and set the groundwork for future development of social 
and economic rights, with the promise of bringing along even such reluctant 
governments as the United States?
Katharine Young’s timely edited volume, The Future of Economic and Social 
Rights, sets us on the right path. In this “thoroughly researched and highly 
illuminating collection of articles” (as quoted from Amartya Sen’s introduction 
to the volume), Young’s authors, as a group, have composed one of the 
more comprehensive volumes on human rights in recent years. The Future of 
Economic and Social Rights presents both theoretical as well as practical solutions, 
documents past as well as future challenges, and, in broadening the lens to 
social and economic rights, links them to trade and development conditions 
and to the importance of democracy itself.
The Future of Economic and Social Rights adds to the rights debate in a number 
of ways. Predictably, this collection begins with several chapters examining 
the social and economic rights discourse and the demands of social justice. As 
such, these chapters trace the experiences of countries enshrining economic 
and social rights with constitutional protection in such diverse locales as 
South Africa, India, and Canada. The conclusion is that about two-thirds 
of the 200 constitutional texts today have enshrined social and economic 
rights, with civil law traditions and former communist countries taking the 
lead. More interestingly, the volume proceeds to also focus on the question of 
the justiciability of social and economic rights and the use of adjudication to 
enforce these rights. 
Certainly, Young’s volume is not the first to examine the judicialization of 
social and economic rights (“SER”) or how rights discourse is filtered and 
reframed to local cultural context. For example, in Social and Economic Rights 
in Theory and Practice: Critical Inquiries, Helena Alviar Garcia, Karl Klare, and 
Lucy Williams gathered together a group of scholars to explore how SER 
are enshrined and enforced in constitutions in the “Global South.” Similarly, 
Sally Engle Merry, in her comparative study Human Rights and Gender Violence: 
Translating International Law into Local Justice, traced how human rights discourse is 
translated and adapted into the local context in China, India, and the United 
States. But Young’s collection picks up where these others left off.
Among the most interesting sections in this volume is the one specifically 
addressing the long-standing challenge to the judicialization of social and 
economic rights as antidemocratic. This challenge parallels the challenge to 
expansive judicial powers generally, but has greater force in the economic 
and social rights context. The critique maintains that social and economic 
rights invite a greater form of judicial review that can circumvent the elected 
branches on issues of unresolvable disagreement. These critics also point 
out that judicial remedies in the social and economic rights context often 
require affirmative government obligations that are resource-intensive and 
Book Review: The Future of Economic and Social Rights
766 Journal of Legal Education
polycentric. Judicial remedies in the face of legislative inaction then are said 
to be problematic as costly, antimajoritarian and undemocratic. 
Young’s authors turn to the process of adjudication itself to argue that the 
use of the courts may be “mutually constitutive of democracy” itself. They 
address the oft-cited argument against economic and social rights litigation 
by noting evidence of new and democratically responsive juridical trends, and 
new modes of review that incorporate and encourage greater participation 
than even the legislative process. Rather than judicial fiat, social and economic 
rights litigation is serving as a platform for a deliberative process that is the 
basis of democratic decision-making.
To start, for example, in “Courts and Economic and Social Rights/Courts 
as Economic and Social Rights,” Judith Resnik points out that rather than 
simply a medium of enforcement of social and economic rights, access to courts 
itself is a social and economic right necessary to the preservation of democracy 
itself. She writes, “[i]f courts make true on their obligations to accord dignified 
and equal treatment to all disputants and do so in public, courts may be one 
venue in which to garner popular support for the continuation of democratic 
sovereignties, struggling as ‘aspiring states’ to fulfill commitments to equality” 
(Resnik, p. 261-62). Furthermore, as documented by Rodriguez-Garavito 
on India (Garavito, pp. 233-58) and Roberto Gargarella on Latin America 
(Gargarella, p. 212-33), the adjudicatory process itself has resulted in designing 
remedies that institute public hearings, meaningful negotiations, and other 
forms of deliberation that are more participatory than otherwise have been 
possible. 
Indeed, these chapters document how some courts in the name of social 
and economic rights scrutinize the participatory processes of decision-making 
and the rationality of budgetary decision-making to ensure that the needs of 
the most vulnerable have been heard and that less restrictive alternatives have 
been considered. In other words, in the context of economic and social rights 
litigation, the trend has been to enforce democratic processes and to ensure 
proper participation and consideration of all the facts in the decision-making. 
As such, enforceable economic and social rights have the potential to be not 
only “mutually constitutive” of democracy, but emblematic of democracy 
itself. 
Looking beyond courts, Young’s authors also examine how new mechanisms 
of accountability have developed, either as human rights institutions or 
specialized administrative commissions or legislative committees providing 
oversight alongside or apart from “courts.” These “accountability” mechanisms 
can be sometimes found at the subnational local level, even if the national supra 
state (including in the United States) is unsupportive of social and economic 
rights. We are reminded, then, of the need to disaggregate the nation state and 
to look for pockets of resistance and success wherever they may be found.
In looking to the future, Young’s authors urge conceiving of social and 
economic rights as more than a “line item” goal with zero-sum gains. Rather, 
\
767
they embrace a more holistic view of these rights as interconnected, with 
“acceptable” baselines, and with “universal” rather than “targeted” measures. 
The argument is that the “line item” method and a “zero-sum” game approach 
has meant a replication of the inequality that exists generally, with the middle 
class benefiting from its greater ability to tackle single-minded goals. And so, 
Young’s authors argue for a fuller sense of how each right is realized in balance 
with other guarantees, how these rights are often indivisible and independent 
from each other, and how they require both affirmative government action as 
well as negative restraint. But here is where the authors differ. While Philip 
Alston engages with his proposal for a Universal Basic Income (Alston, 
p. 377), a series of chapters takes a comparative look to see how countries 
utilize different benchmarks, with adequacy sometimes more successful than 
exposing “equality” concerns.
Finally, the volume brings back the importance of markets and the state, 
recognition of the pressure upon the state in its regulation of markets, and 
meaningful appreciation for how rights-based review cannot neglect study 
of how domestic revenues are mobilized, by trade tariffs, taxation, and other 
international sources of support (under Olivier De Schutter’s extensive 
analysis). Concerns about sustainability and other limits on growth when 
grappling with the earth’s changing climate are also brought to the fore. 
Jeremy Perelman explores the intersection of rights with practices of economic 
globalization and development with his terminology of a “rights-ification” of 
development. (Perelman, pp. 434-70).
In sum, this is a rich volume, and one that will serve as an enduring 
handbook for years to come.
Book Review: The Future of Economic and Social Rights


Book Review of The Future of Economic and Social Rights by Katherine Young

Paul, Jeremy

1From the Editors 
Traditional legal education has long and rightly been faulted for its 
overemphasis on litigation as the core path through which the law develops. 
Increased attention to transactional work has remedied this situation 
somewhat. But many law schools continue to give almost slavish devotion 
to courtroom technique and formal submissions as the sole method through 
which lawyers present evidence and argument.
Consider the mind-set of the diligent student preparing for moot court. Her 
concern often centers on fear of questions about some details in a footnote that 
she has overlooked. But in practice, most lawyers find themselves frequently 
called upon to make presentations to impatient, unprepared audiences. In 
such settings, the refined skills of written and oral argument may fall on deaf 
ears unless they are paired with a flair for simplification and ways to command 
attention.
Our authors in this issue are leading the effort to expand legal education’s 
horizons. Expertly assembled by guest editors Michael Asimow and Ticien 
Marie Sassoubre, this symposium issue illustrates the many ways law can be 
better understood through use of videos both in the classroom and in the 
world of persuasion. Our authors further demonstrate how using popular 
culture can be a productive way to communicate effectively with our students. 
Along the same theme in this issue is a reflective essay from veteran law and 
literature professor Thomas Morawetz, who shines fresh light on how lawyers 
might benefit from reading fiction and philosophy. Dawn Watkins and Laura 
Guihen round out these articles with a fascinating study of how metaphors can 
be used not only to improve argumentative skills but to enhance the quality of 
feedback we provide our students.
Our At the Lectern from Julie A. Oseid playfully illustrates how losing her 
voice helped her find new ways to succeed. And Judith Welch Wegner uses a 
perceptive review of Neil W. Hamilton’s book, Roadmap: The Law Student’s Guide 
to Meaningful Employment, to call upon all of us in the legal academy to focus on 
development of professional identity. Enjoy!
Jeremy Paul 
Margaret Y.K. Woo
Journal of Legal Education, Volume 68, Number 1 (Autumn 2018)


From the Editors

Batlan, Felice

Bass, Joshua

Beyond Greed Is Good:  Pop Culture in the Business Law Classroom

Papy, Donald

Dr. Strangelaw, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying  and Love Pop Culture

Balsam, Jodi S.

Teaming Up to Learn in the Doctrinal Classroom

Chen, Li

Early Graduate Legal Studies in America and Legal TransplantationThe Case of China’s First International and Comparative Legal Scholar

Hamilton, Neil W

Book Review of The Formation of Professional Identity: The Path from Student to Lawyer

Deo, Meera E.

The Paradox of Faculty-Student Interactions

Not a member yet

Introduction to the Symposium on Visual Images and Popular Culture in Legal Education

A Study of the Relationship Between Law School Coursework and Bar Exam Outcomes

Book Review of The Future of Economic and Social Rights by Katherine Young

From the Editors

Beyond Greed Is Good: Pop Culture in the Business Law Classroom

Dr. Strangelaw, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Pop Culture

Teaming Up to Learn in the Doctrinal Classroom

Early Graduate Legal Studies in America and Legal TransplantationThe Case of China’s First International and Comparative Legal Scholar

Book Review of The Formation of Professional Identity: The Path from Student to Lawyer

The Paradox of Faculty-Student Interactions

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