TRU Library Book Displays

Summary: Gregory Peck won an Oscar for his brilliant performance as the Southern lawyer who defends a black man accused of rape in this film version of the Pulitzer Prize winning novel by Harper Lee. The way in which it captures a time, a place and above all, a mood, makes this film a masterpiece.

Summary: Tempers rise as a jury of middle-aged men find themselves unable to sway a single member of their group to the majority opinion. Confronted with a seemingly clear-cut case, bolstered by opinions and assumptions, but with no verdict in sight the group threatens to become deadlocked. Will the 12th juror, stubbornly convinced of a young defendent's innocence, be able to sway the entire group to his viewpoint, or will the group ultimately force the holdout to forego his concerns, potentially ignoring truth in a rush to judgment?

Bill Gambini and Stan Rothenstein are a couple of 21-year-old college guys taking a cross-country road trek to UCLA via the back roads of the deep South. They should be having the time of their lives, except for one small mishap: They are wrongfully arrested in Wahzoo City, Alabama, for murdering a convenience store clerk. At best, they face long-term jail sentences; at worst...the electric chair. Their only hope is legal representation from Bill's cousin Vinny, a Brooklyn lawyer who took six years to pass the bar and only made it six weeks ago. This is not only his first murder trial it's his first case. Refusing help from his fiery Brooklyn girlfriend, Lisa, the novice lawyer must wrestle with legal procedures in an alien environment under the intimidating eye of Chamberlain Haller, a tough country judge with an obsession for the letter of the law and a powerful dislike for Vinny.

A young boy witnesses a suicide and hears a last-minute confession that puts him in mortal danger. In an effort to protect himself and his family, the boy hires a lawyer to defend his right not to reveal what he knows. Based on the best-selling novel by John Grisham.

A powerful and thought-provoking true story, Just Mercy follows young lawyer Bryan Stevenson (Jordan) and his history-making battle for justice. After graduating from Harvard, Bryan had his pick of lucrative jobs. Instead, he heads to Alabama to defend those wrongly condemned or who were not afforded proper representation, with the support of local advocate Eva Ansley (Larson). One of his first, and most incendiary, cases is that of Walter McMillian (Foxx), who, in 1987, was sentenced to die for the notorious murder of an 18-year-old girl, despite a preponderance of evidence proving his innocence and the fact that the only testimony against him came from a criminal with a motive to lie. In the years that follow, Bryan becomes embroiled in a labyrinth of legal and political maneuverings and overt and unabashed racism as he fights for Walter, and others like him, with the odds — and the system — stacked against them.

Paul Newman stars as a down-and-out, ambulance-chasing attorney who becomes involved in a controversial lawsuit. Winning is Newman's last chance for personal and professional redemption.

The story begins when Samuel is found dead in the snow outside the isolated chalet where he lived with his wife Sandra, a German writer, and their partially-sighted 11-year-old son Daniel. An investigation leads to a conclusion of suspicious death : it's impossible to know for sure whether he took his own life or was killed. Sandra is indicted, and we follow her trial which pulls the couple's relationship apart. Daniel is caught in the middle: between the trial and their home life, doubts take their toll on the mother-son relationship.

The Last Duel is based on Eric Jager's book The Last Duel: A True Story of Crime, Scandal, and Trial by Combat in Medieval France, which brings the turbulent Middle Ages to life in striking detail. When etiquette, social aspirations and justice were driven by the codes of chivalry, the consequences for defying the institutions of the time - the Church, the nobility at court, a teenage king - could be severe. For a woman navigating these violent times, one who had no legal standing without the support of her husband, the stakes were even higher.

Senator Ranse Stoddard returns to the city Shinbone in the Wild West to go to the funeral of his friend, Tom Doniphon. To a journalist, who's wondering what the senator is doing in Shinbone, he tells how his career started as the man who shot Liberty Valance . As a lawyer he went to Shinbone, where he met his wife Hallie and Tom Doniphon. He taught the people there to read and write. Then he met the greatest bandit of the region, Liberty Valance....

In the early 1950s, Los Angeles was a booming, would-be utopia, and anything was possible for those with a dream and the drive to make it happen. But in this heady era, crime and corruption infiltrate the highest corridors of power and threaten to rule the city. Three L.A.P.D. officers whose characters reflect their city — whose outward images conflict with their inner passions and realities — become separately entangled in a web of intrigue and deceit that might destroy them all.

A fictionalized account of the first major successful sexual harassment case in the United States — Jenson vs. Eveleth Mines, where a woman who endured a range of abuse while working as a miner filed and won the landmark 1984 lawsuit.

The way a society punishes demonstrates its commitment to standards of judgment and justice, its distinctive views of blame and responsibility, and its particular way of responding to evil. Punishment in Popular Culture examines the cultural presuppositions that undergird America's distinctive approach to punishment and analyzes punishment as a set of images, a spectacle of condemnation. It recognizes that the semiotics of punishment is all around us, not just in the architecture of the prison, or the speech made by a judge as she sends someone to the penal colony, but in both "high" and "popular" culture iconography, in novels, television, and film.

Law and justice are important themes in film, not only in courtroom dramas, but also in the western, the film noir, even the documentary. In the Godfather trilogy Francis Ford Coppola shows that the Mafia possesses its own strict codes, even though they are in conflict with those of the criminal justice system. In Woody Allen's Crimes and Misdemeanors the protagonist also "gets away with murder," but with a different dramatic intent by the director and a different effect on the audience. Shedding light on myriad facets of the law/film relationship, fourteen contributors to Legal Reelism analyze films ranging from The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, It's a Wonderful Life, and Drums along the Mohawk to Do the Right Thing, Basic Instinct, The Thin Blue Line, and Thelma and Louise.

The courtroom, like the movie theater, is an arena for the telling and interpreting of stories. Investigators piece them together, witnesses tell them, advocates retell them, and judges and juries assess their plausibility. These narratives reconstitute absent events through words, and their filming constitutes a double narrative: one important cultural practice rendered in the terms of another.   Drawing on both film studies and legal scholarship, David A. Black explores the implications of representing court procedure, as well as other phases of legal process, in film.

From the earliest days of the movies, filmmakers have turned to the courtroom for stories because it is an ideal setting for both drama and comedy. Fans of those courtroom movies can turn to Reel Justice for a verdict on both recent and classic courtroom films. Informative and entertaining, Reel Justice rates trial scenes in films on a one-to-four-gavel scale, with four being a classic and one being "ask for a new trial."

'Law and Justice on the Small Screen' is a wide-ranging collection of essays about law in and on television. In light of the book's innovative taxonomy of the field and its international reach, it will make a novel contribution to the scholarly literature about law and popular culture. Television shows from France, Canada, the United Kingdom, Germany, Spain and the United States are discussed. The book's content is organised to make it appropriate for undergraduate and graduate classes in the following areas: media studies, law and culture, socio-legal studies, comparative law, jurisprudence, the law of lawyering, alternative dispute resolution and criminal law.

Film and the Law is distinctive in a number of ways: it is unique as a sustained book-length exposition on law and film by law scholars; it is distinctive within law and film scholarship in its attempt to plot the parameters of a distinctive genre of law films; its examination of law in film as place and space offers a new way out of the law film genre problem, and also offers an examination of representations of an aspect of legal practice, and legal institutions, that have not been addressed by other scholars. This book is a valuable teaching and learning resource, and is the first in the field to serve as a basic guidebook for students of law and film.

Imagining Legality: Where Law Meets Popular Culture is collection of essays on the relationship between law and popular culture that posits, in addition to the concepts of law in the books and law in action, a third concept of law in the image--that is, of law as it is perceived by the public through the lens of public media. Imagining Legality argues that images of law suggested by television and film are as numerous as they are various, and that they give rise to a potent and pervasive imaginative life of the law. The media's projections of the legal system remind us not only of the way law lives in our imagination but also of the contingencies of our own legal and social arrangements.

Movie Therapy for Law Students is packed with black letter law, dozens of exam study tips, useful Internet links and other valuable resources for law students, legal movie trivia and other interesting nuggets. It is geared toward law students, but entertaining and straightforward enough for anyone.