AP Research: Lights, Camera, Objection!: The Characterization of Defense and Prosecution in Contemporary Trial Film
Advisor: Bryan Meyerowitz
The legal profession is one that is incredibly dependent on how it is viewed by the general public. The
majority of the general public derives their opinion of the legal system and career, not through personal
experience, but rather through the popular media that they view. My research seeks to answer the
question, “To what extent does there exist a bias against either side of counsel within American trial film
from the 21st century?” To answer this question, I will conduct a qualitative content analysis of the
dialogue of significant trial films made in the 21st century, using open coding to distinguish prevalent
themes across movies. First, I will categorize the dialogue to be anti-prosecution or anti-defense. Then, I
will code the dialogue to a theme, like “greed,” “pride,” or “inefficiency.” Because past literature has
suggested a difference in content of films based on a true story and films based entirely on fiction, I will
be conducting separate analyses for each category. I hypothesize that films based entirely on fiction will
present with a negative bias towards defense counsel, and films based on true stories will present with a
negative bias towards prosecution counsel.
Project Blog
Post 1: Pretrial: Movies, Law, & Why Any of it Matters
Harvey Specter. Miles Edgeworth. Jack McCoy.
These are just a few of the (mostly) beloved fictional litigators from popular franchises. If you’ve seen any piece of media with a trial in it, you’ve likely seen a fictional lawyer in action. If you’ve seen any fictional lawyer in action, you’ve probably developed an opinion about it. Does that opinion actually matter?
Research suggests that it does. Lawyers, unlike other professions of a similar nature, find themselves in the unique position of having most of their reputation derived from representations on the big and little screen. Even if you indulge in a bit of House M.D., you won’t be aghast if your actual medical provider is nothing like the scathing, brilliant titular character. If you fancy yourself a fan of Law & Order: Criminal Intent, though, you might find yourself disappointed if the lawyer you watch present during a reluctant stint at jury duty doesn’t command the room the same way A.D.A. Carver does.
This largely derives from the fact that the profession of a trial lawyer is, first and foremost, a performer. When you hire legal representation, you aren’t simply hiring the first name you find from Harvard law, but rather, you’re hiring a performance. With this performance comes certain expectations—expectations that are built by the media that represents them.
All of this culminated in my research question: to what extent does there exist a bias in favor of or against either side of counsel within American trial film from the 21st century?
I hypothesize that fictional films will present with a positive bias towards defense counsel, and films based on true stories will present with a positive bias towards prosecution counsel. Our inherent human nature to root for the underdog might suggest that people are drawn to stories with sympathetic defendants. But in the case of stories based on real life, it’s probably more difficult to portray the defendant—who has likely already been prosecuted—with a positive spin.
After you chose your research question/project goal, which information guided your choice of a research method/artistic process?
Detecting the presence of bias can be done through different ways, and in the genre of film, there’s no shortage of elements to analyze. Unfortunately, I don’t have much training in film analysis, especially when it comes to nuances in lighting and sound, so the method I felt most comfortable and confident in analyzing was dialogue coding. I also think this is the most systematic approach to take. More details on this coming soon to a blog near you! :)
Post 2: 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.
Post 3: Direct Examination I: Dialogue, Bias, & What to Do With All of It
I have a research question. Now all that’s left is to answer it!
My question looks at the presence of bias in film. To answer that, obviously I had to utilize a metric of film analysis, but there’s a lot that goes into films! I had options between direction, acting, dialogue, and more, but I found that the one I was most comfortable with and that seemed most relevant to my question was analyzing dialogue. After all, dialogue can account for plot points, characterization, and setting, which other metrics of film analysis might not be able to do.
Specifically, I’m using what’s called open-source iterative coding to analyze that dialogue. That means that after I collect all the dialogue I find pertinent, I’m going to be looking for common themes that pop up across them. Is “corruption” a recurring idea? That becomes a theme to sort dialogue with.
To choose what dialogue I analyze, I’m going to be collecting the timestamps of any piece of dialogue that negatively characterizes either defense or prosecution in any way. I initially had a plan to collect timestamps of positive characterization of either defense or prosecution as well; however, I realized a few days into my data collection process that such dialogue is more subjective—what I consider positive characterization may not necessarily be what someone else thinks. With negative characterization, though, it’s almost always an objectively clear statement.
Of course, I also needed movies to watch! I didn’t think it entirely feasible to watch the 280+ movies Asimov watched, so I narrowed down my original list. My original list was created using IMDB, Wikipedia, and other popular sources, and it consisted of every trial film I could find that Hollywood released in the last 25 years. I only wanted movies that people considered seriously though—there was no point in analyzing a movie if everyone universally hated it. So, I only chose movies that either were in the top 100 films of their year on a box office list, or had at least a 75% score on Rotten Tomatoes. This left me with a final list of 36 movies, which is loads better than 280.
What was one obstacle or challenge you encountered while implementing your research method, and how did you address it?
As mentioned above, I realized that positive characterization was more ambiguous in movies than negative—when rethinking the significance of my question as well, I realized that negative characterization was ultimately more relevant, and so I limited my scope to analyzing only those pieces of dialogue, and adapted my question as such.
Post 4: Direct Examination II: Data, Timelines, & How to Keep Track of It All
It’s been a month or so since I began watching movies, and while it is far too early to come to significant conclusions about my data so far, it’s still interesting enough to put into a blog post of its own. So far, I am about halfway through watching all of my nonfiction movies, and it’s presented with some interesting trends!
For one thing, I’ve found that almost all the movies I’ve seen so far are very character focused—in most of the movies, we find the focus of the plot on one singular character’s work and personal life. In civil cases, this is usually the attorney, and in criminal cases, it is usually the defendant.
The next striking finding so far is the stark difference between representations from civil cases and criminal cases. In every movie with a criminal case that I’ve seen so far, it is prosecution shown with an extreme negative bias. In every movie with a civil case that I’ve seen so far, the prosecution is the protagonist or hero of the story, but defense counsel is not shown in an overtly negative light. More often, it is the defendant in civil cases—large corporations—that are shown negatively, and not necessarily their representative counsel. This is really interesting to watch develop, because I really did expect that there would be more variation—looking forward to seeing if this continues or changes with further movies.
My method so far has worked with my research question: each movie I’ve seen has produced 0-8 timestamps that are reflective of how they characterize defense or prosecution. I do have movies that do not negatively represent either defense or prosecution at all, hence the lowest value being 0. Because of this, at the end of my movie binging, I am planning on giving an overall value to each movie. For now, I am thinking of negative prosecution points minus negative defense points for a total value, and then I hope to be able to rank my movies from a scale of extremely biased against defense to neutral to extremely biased against prosecution. This should produce an easy visualization of any bias I find.
But until then, it’s back to the movies.
What might be the real-world implications or consequences related to your findings?
Movies have an obvious impact on our personal opinions of others, although the extent of that impact is contested. As just one example, if criminal prosecutors are consistently shown in a negative light, it can mean that prospective law students are disillusioned to the field, creating a negative outlook for the profession’s future.
Post 5: Cross Examination I: Final Results, Conclusions, & Where to Go From Here
It took me some time, but I finally did it—all the nonfiction movies on my list have been watched and analyzed with my research method. Here’s the data that garnered!
As I already discussed in my previous blog posts, the movies continued a trend of opting to show prosecution in a negative light more often than defense. Before I continue, let me explain a new bit of my method that I added: in order to ensure I could make an overall judgment of bias for my movies, I decided to include a points system. I would give each movie a +1 for any anti-defense pieces of dialogue and a -1 for any anti-prosecution pieces of dialogue, then sum it all up for a final value. If a movie has a final negative score, I will categorize it as anti-prosecution; if a movie has a final positive score, I will categorize it as anti-defense; and if a movie has a final score of zero, I will categorize it as neutral.
With this method, I was able to make a broader judgment of bias. Out of 17 movies, nine had more anti-prosecution points than anti-defense, with four movies neutral. Only three movies were found to have more anti-defense points than anti-prosecution, and when looking at the themes that arose from the categories, it is also evident that the themes of anti-prosecution are of a higher severity. Below, you can see a table of categories for both anti-prosecution and anti-defense.
Theme (Anti-Prosecution) | Frequency
Racial Discrimination | 7
Witness Manipulation | 7
Lack of Competency | 4
Lack of Compassion | 3
Excess Power | 3
Other Manipulation | 2
Theme (Anti-defense) | Frequency
Lack of Competency | 5
Lack of Compassion | 4
Intimidation | 2
Interesting to note is how anti-prosecution themes, especially racial discrimination, seem to speak to a systemic problem, while anti-defense themes suggest more of an individual problem, although there does seem to be a trend against public defenders. Next, I’ll be looking at if this trend continues or diverges in completely fictional movies!
Think about the initial curiosity that led to your inquiry. What other areas of inquiry might that same curiosity lead you?
I envision two alternative paths: one, an evaluation of the representation of the justice system as a whole, not just lawyers, in popular media; or two, an evaluation of bias against either defense or prosecution in the context of news media. I think both of these would be interesting to consider for future projects!