Law and Popular Culture

Catalog description

Law is everywhere around us, and the most unlikely of places are the best subjects to examine. Even in contexts outside the obviously legal, law manifests, constantly updating itself. If traditional legal education and other formal legal representations represent the "high culture" of law, what is deemed popular culture, that which is modern, material, and local--unabashedly represents the "low." This class examines the dissemination of legal information to the masses and the concomitant effect of the masses upon the law. By examining film, literature, art, and music, students will learn the dialectical influences of law and humanity, and how this is translated into various media.