Crusader-heroes, or ugly, serious & boring? Mark Pawlowski takes a critical look at lawyers & law schools as portrayed on screen
In The Paper Chase (1973), first year law student, James Hart, struggles to gain approval and recognition from his daunting contract teacher, Professor Kingsfield, at Harvard Law School. The school is depicted as a forbidding place (suitable only for highly competitive students), and Kingsfield himself is shown as a cold, sadistic figure who humiliates his students by posing deliberately difficult and confounding questions. In his first contract law class, he tells his audience: ‘In my classroom there is always another question, and another question to follow your answer. Yes, you are on a treadmill; my little questions are the fingers probing your brain. We do brain surgery here. You teach yourselves the law, but I train your mind. You come in here with a skull full of mush, and you leave thinking like a lawyer.’
The film Legally Blonde (2001) also concerns student life at Harvard and here too the professors are portrayed in a distinctively negative way. Elle Woods encounters
