Opening Statement: Context, Literature, & What Any of it Means

What’s a research paper without a literature review? Not a very good research paper.

In this week’s installment, I’m going to be discussing a few sources that helped guide my early research. First up is “Conventional wisdom: The courtroom trial in American popular culture” by David Ray Papke. This paper notes that movies seem to be moving towards showing prosecution in a positive light. More on this in a second…

Next, we have “Law in Film: Globalizing the Hollywood Courtroom Drama” by Stefan Machura, Stefan Ulbrich, Francis M. Nevins, and Nils Behling. This paper establishes not just the regional effect of Hollywood trial films, but the global one as well. Did you know Germans are more familiar with the U.S. courtroom than their own? This paper helps establish the significance of my research.

Last but certainly not least, we have probably my most useful and beloved source: “Bad Lawyers in the Movies” by Michael Asimov. In the most relevant part of this very, very long paper, Asimov and his research assistants conducted an analysis of over 280(!!) movies to look at the characterization of lawyers as a whole. He found that the negative portrayal of lawyers sharply increased from the 1930s to 1990s—from 36% of movies to 52%. Yikes! With the results of his research, I am going into my project with the understanding that it is more likely to find a negative portrayal of a lawyer than a positive one.

With all this research out there, you might be wondering where there’s any gap for my research. While Papke might have suggested a trend, no significant analysis has been done as to if that trend exists since the late 1990s. Actually, since the turn of the century, no one’s really given a second glance to trial films at all! I wanted to give this neglected area of research some love, and thus, my research question was born.

How did you evaluate the sources you collected to make sure they were credible, valid, and reliable? Which sources did you discard, and why?

I only searched for sources in academic databases like JSTOR, EBSCO, and Google Scholar to ensure that they would be, in fact, credible, valid, and reliable. On top of this, I also researched the authors behind the papers I used to make sure they were properly credentialed and knowledgeable in the topic they were writing on. Sources I discarded were only discarded because they didn’t serve any relevance to my question. For example, I found many papers simply detailing the commonalities of trial films across the genre, but this wasn’t directly relevant to my question, so I didn’t make use of it in my paper.